John Bevilaqua

William, We heard this directly from Joe Oster, Banister's former partner in the Detective Agency. He told us he never heard anything about Guy being in the ONI. Said Banister wasn't in the service either, as he had already joined the FBI. Joe left Banister to form Southern Research, because he said Guy was more interested in politics (Segregation), than running a business! -Bill O Hi Bill, I'm not arguing with you. There are two Guy Johnsons in the CIA files who might be related. Guy Persic Johnson is the guy I am interested in. While he is dead his son is alive. Guy P. Johnson was definately ONI, and according to Jack Martin, the guy who caused Guy Banister all sorts of consternation for connecting him to the assassination, it was Guy P. Johnson who had a copy of the "Homme Report," from the counsel to the Eastland committee which contained evidence that RFK tried to kill Castro. Both Homme and Guy P. Johnson were stationed in the South Pacific in the 50s and worked on a CIA project together, and both were associated with Bud Festerwald at the time of the Garrison investigation. I have a bounty out for anybody who comes up with a copy of the so-called "Homme Report," but for some reason, I don't think it will be easy to come buy, even for those who want to falsely pin the blame the assassination on RFK. BK What does the CIA even have to do with either Operation Red Cross, the Oswald legend building process, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, SISS, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, Medgar Evers, Jr., The Birmingham Choir Girls, The Freedom Riders, Gerald L K Smith, Wesley Swift, the KKK, the NSRP of Senator J. Strom Thurmond, The Ghosts of Mississippi, The Dallas John Birch Society, The Shickshinny Knights of Malta, the Dixie Clan, the American Nazi Party, Emmett Till, Wickliffe Draper, Charles Willoughby, H. L. Hunt, Leander Perez, the Jung Hotel Meeting, HUAC, Robert Morris, The World Anti-Communist League, The Pioneer Fund or even Guy Banister in New Orleans for that matter? Something is wildly amiss here.

John, where do you stand on the possibility that both Operation Red Cross and the operation behind the LHO legend building were done basically almost entirely by the SISS and HUAC crowds surrounding Eastland, Banister, Morris, Draper and his Pioneer Fund cohorts by extension and implication? And where do you (and others) stand on the other possibility that if these Ghosts of Mississippi from SISS, The Dallas John Birch Society, the Shickshinny Knights of Malta and the MissSovComm pulled off what they are now credited with using the MissSovComm laundered funding plus other Draper money and the inspiration from Draper, The Pioneer Fund and Company that they were able to take it one step further and snuff JFK as their own personal but gigantic project? It is a pretty scary thought to think that they could have pulled off "the big one", too, but quite honestly, I would not put that beyond them for a New York minute. All they needed was the Big Four from the American Security Council: Morris, Willoughby, Angleton and Cline with their blackmail files and their influence peddling among all the Senators and the Reps, and the active and retired Generals and they were good to go. I have been saying this for years now, and I have just about convinced myself on that score. They got the nod from Dulles, MacArthur and others, but all they needed was a little nudge to get that nod. I bet that even Cardinal Francis Spellman was asked for his ok. There was an Admiral Francis Spellman on Shickshinny Knights, too. I wonder if he was related somehow. The rest is history.

Bill, someone I know is obtaining all sorts of files on John D. Sullivan in the near future. What more can you tell us about him in advance? Send me a PM if you would like to take a look at some of these released documents, if anything of major proportions even exists on him. What can you share about Banister and his roles within several different Banana Dictatorship countries for United Fruit, which was started by Andrew Preston, as Boston Fruit before the turn of the century? Preston was the first cousin of Wickliffe Preston Draper from Hopedale, about 35 miles from Boston. Just got a book about the working conditions at these United Fruit sites in Latin America. Made the Mississippi cotton plantations look like child's play in comparison. A sack of cotton weighed very little, but a bunch of bananas could have 250-300 bananas and weighed over 100 pounds each. And a banana worker might have to lug tens of dozens of these bunches each and every day. And the conditions at the New England textile mill company towns were pretty bad, too. They were indoors but the noise of the machines, the working conditions and the pay scales were really quite miserable. Draper fought FDR tooth and nail on things like Social Security and other "employee benefits" of which there were none. You got to live in a company owned house where you paid rent, buy food and clothing from the company owned stores and buy wood or oil from the company owned suppliers. If you had anything left after all those debts every week it was considered a miracle. See: http://www.hope1842. com Insiders supposedly called it "Hopeless, MA" not Hopedale, MA. As long as you did not cross "the man" you had a job at The Draper Company where they manufactured textile loom equipment. The index to Hope1842.com can be found at http://www.5000watches.com/Hopedale The Drapers and the Prestons apparently took all they learned about Cotton plantations in the South and implemented these features for both United Fruit and later for the New England based company towns. Even Senator James O. Eastland and his ancestors owned Mississippi cotton plantations and Eastland managed to force the price of cottonseed oil up to reward his constituents.

Couple of items of interest on your short list just above related to Man Cand by Richard Condon and the JFK conundrum: 1) Wesley K. Swift was with the Christian Defense League operated by Gerald L K Smith (Winnipeg Airport Incident) who used Swift as his personal bodyguard for several decades. And of course, Richard Condon mentioned both Rev. Gerald L K Smith and Father Charles Coughlin, BY NAME, in Man Cand. Rumor has it that Senator Thomas J. Dodd from Connecticut, who went to Providence College and was always a lifetime friend of the Church, spared both the Catholic Church and Father Coughlin the embarassment and humiliation of being indicted as a Nazi agent, a Tokyo Rose, or as a violator of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1917 when Anastase Vonsiatsky was arrested in the early 1940's. Vonsiatsky, of course, was THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in the Condon novel. Since Dodd also served as a prosecutor on the Nuremberg Tribunals, he was considered a Nazi hater and their natural enemy and not a Nazi collaborator or sympathizer, but Senator James O. Eastland, however was another case entirely. Could Dodd have changed his mind about the Spy vs. Spy entanglements and decided that Russia could only be defeated by taking sides with the Nazis from Paperclip and other similar programs? Certainly. Was Dodd fascinated by the case of Bogdhan Stashinsky as described later in Murder to Order by Karl Anders? For sure he was. He traveled to West Berlin to visit Stash in jail there using SISS funds after Oswald was killed and was later censured for doing so and never won an election again. Punishment for sticking his nose into SISS and Eastland's private business? For sure. Dodd also knew all the players at SMOM and SKOM and the Vatican and might have been consulted on the decision (by Eastland, Robert Morris from Fordham, Otto Otepka from Catholic University, Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.) and others to snuff JFK, but I have never heard of any evidence to that effect one way or the other. Just pretty good speculation. When I went to Providence College to do some Vonsiatsky research, the library curators and management were all up in arms about the possibility that Dodd might be indicted by me or others as a co-conspirator. Maybe they were already familiar with the work of George Michael Evica in this regard. It is sort of a shame that I chose to look at the SISS Eastland evidence, the Draper Genetics Committee evidence about Eastland and the MissSovComm evidence against Eastland and came down very hard on him, while finding Dodd pretty much innocent of such deviousness and criminal intent, and Evica did just the opposite, indicting Dodd and ignoring Eastland. We probably could have and would have worked together on this SISS and Pioneer Fund complicity in the JFK hit, if only we could have agreed on the role of Dodd vs. the role of Eastland, but we were both pretty intransigent on that score unfortunately and we went our separate ways. Plus I had no real interest in the Albert Schweitzer College thread preferring to focus on the Pioneer Fund, Draper and Vonsiatsky threads while Evica wanted to pursue the Frederic Osborne leads. Such is life. Too many topics, so little time. 2) Edwin A. Walker was not only named by Jack Ruby as his personal suspect in the JFK hit, but interacted with J. Strom Thurmond (Senator Thomas Jordan in Man Cand) during the Muzzling of the Military hearings. Robert J. Morris ("Lord Morris Croftnol" = "Lord Frontal Morris) in Man Cand and "Major Dismiss" = "R. Morris is Mad" also in Man Cand by Condon) was Edwin Walker's attorney right after the Ole Miss insurrection project and Morris was Otepka's attorney after the Walt Rostow hearings that resulted in getting Otepka fired. 3) Alex Rorke, Jr. of course was with Willoughby/MacArthur forces Man Cand forces, Billy James Hargis, Edward ManCand Hunter and Sarah McClendon at ACL CofC for years. MacArthur was cited using 2 oil paintings of his in the movie, but only appears in the book and the movie as Benjamin K. Arthur, the Presidential Candidate in the final scene of the move. This was probably done using poetic license by Sinatra and the producer. 4) Edward Scanlon Butler of Alton Ochsner's INCA did the Oswald New Orleans radio interview further building his legend as a returning Commie in sheep's clothing. Ochsner later joined these guys as head of The Council for National Policy: Nelson Bunker Hunt, Edwin Meese III, Pat Robertson whose father Willis A. Robertson was the "other" Senator from Louisiana when Huey Long was assassinated by the Gerald L K Smith forces who then snuffed the resident patsy Carl Weiss, Thomas F. Ellis, III from the Board of the Pioneer Fund, Tim LaHaye, etc. Oswald checked out a book about Huey Long from the N.O. Public Library, something to do with a project related to blowing up the Huey Long bridge across the Mississippi... I forget precisely right now. 5) Milteer, Wesley K. Swift, Jack Brown, Robert Morris and Willie Somersett discussed Oswald and the JFK case during tape recorded and written transcripts, plus they were later implicated in the MLK case or the MLK character assassination attempts as well. The Robert Morris image file at the MSC has GIFs of some of his efforts to use someone name O'Dell to paint MLK with the ComSymp guilt by association brush. Morris was everywhere in the JFK and MLK cases. And he was everywhere in Man Cand by Richard Condon. Everywhere. Condon, you pulled off an amazing feat and should be congratulated for that. 6) The Hunts were very close with Willoughby before, during and after the Korean War. All of them profited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by cornering the World Soybean futures market according to Prof. Bruce Cumings then staging the incident leading to the start of the Korean War, exactly like Hitler staged a fake attack on Germany by Polish soldiers and then claimed that he acted with a retaliatory counter attack against Poland when he invaded. Willoughby learned from Hitler and did the same thing in Korea. Overall, the evidence here is almost overwhelming. The John F. Kennedy hit is yet another unsolved Mississippi Civil Rights Cold Case done by Klansmen and kinsmen surrounding Draper, Eastland, Banister, Walker and their Ghosts of Mississippi. The evidence is overwhelming, undeniable and penultimately, convincing for all but the most obstinate. "Dixie's Dirty Secrets" by James Dickerson is on my reading list even though it was not well received. Darn book still costs about $40 with shipping for the most part. More later...

Have to find out who said this, but it is quite telling: "...Kennedy was killed because he wanted to teach the Nigras how to read and how to vote and how to join the Unions and all that." After all, Lincoln was killed because he would not keep his cotton pickin' hand off the 'cotton pickers' plight. And he was killed by Draper cronies. And Mary Todd Lincoln actually married a Draper as her second husband. And Booth hid out at Garrett's Farm, the grandfather of The Pioneer Fund Garrett from Columbia. And when both United Fruit and Boston Fruit created Banana slave plantations in Latin America, and Draper created New England textile mill slave plantations, the pattern was firmly set. Keep your banana peelin' and 'cotton pickin' hands off our little robber baron slave empires. If you won't help us topple unfriendly Banana Dictators and Regimes like those run by Castro, Arbenz, Bosch and others we will damn well do it ourselves. And the Sovereign Military Order of Malta Grand Poohbahs started both the FBI (Bonaparte, OSJ) and the CIA (Wild Bill Donovan, OSJ). And when they decided that JFK was just not 'Catholic' enough, was just not 'Militant' enough and was just not 'anti-Communist enough' the Shickshinny Knights of Malta launched a "Christian Anti-Communist Crusade" AGAINST JFK as if he were the heathen and the infidel and the ComSymp traitor. Saladin was no match for the Crusaders. Kennedy was no match for these Crusaders. Hussein and Khomeni were no match either. The Muslims and the Islamic infidels are now in the cross hairs of these Crusaders for Christ the King. It might take 100 more years, but the American Century of Henry Luce and Bill Clinton will be advanced and supported by the Rise of the Fourth Reich, so help me God. And so it was written.

John, your work on the MissSovComm files and on the right wing extremists has been an inspiration to us all in the JFK case. You are one of the very few who sees through the smoke and the mirrors to get to the core of composition of the JFK haters and the JFK plotters. Thank you for your persistence and your insistence that this nexus of White Supremacists were the most logical ones to be motivated enough to execute the actual plot, plus the cover-up and the scapegoating of Oswald. Tell me more about this Senator J. Strom Thurmond role with the Walker defenders groups. This was about "muzzling the military" and the pro-Blue campaign, right? The Thurmond character in ManCand by Condon was "Senator Thomas Jordan" an almost PERFECT ANAGRAM for "J. Strom Thormond", the God of War, try it for yourself. Thurmond also appeared in movie version of "The Strange Ordeal of Otto Otepka" with Robert J. Morris and James B. Utt US Rep from California. There are 7 more GIF image articles pulled from the Robert Morris files at the MissSovComm, mostly about Martin Luther King though. Morris was one of the big wigs pushing the thesis that MLK was a Communist and a chaser of "white women" which escaped my examination. You know, Eastland, Thurmond, Goldwater, Dirksen, Tower and the other Senators did not even need the CIA to pull off this entire operation whatsoever. They had their own former FBI agents, their own Army Intel bastidges, their own Stasi with the MissSovComm, their own Gestapo, their Stormtroopers their Waffen SS, everything they needed. Most of all they had the KKK and the Shickshinny Knights of Malta. Morris and Willoughby on the American Security Council along with Cline, Angleton and Frawley, too, but for my money Cline and Angleton were never really in favor of a democracy, they were Nazis, Fascists and self-serving money grubbers using anti-Communism to raise funds to line their pockets.

Some one on another forum asked me about the Wanted for Treason poster and the presence of the Weissman name... Bernard Weissman was his name as I recall, and I think it was printed on that poster, too. Just like the use of Jack Ruby as a focused minor player in the JFK hit, so they could cite the fact that: "Ruby is really Rubenstein" in later references to him. The influence of Rev. Gerald L K Smith in the design of the JFK plot AND the scapegoating later on was very, very important. Smith was involved in the Huey Long assassination after he found out that Long had plans to get rid of Smith from the Share the Wealth program. Who was the scapegoat then, murdered on the spot by Long's bodyguards according to my hypothesis? Dr. Carl Weiss, who was later called: "Karl Weiss, the Jewish Communist doctor" in Cross and the Flag when he started throwing stones at him. Smith headed up The Nazi Silver Shirts organization with William Dudley Pelley, who was convicted of violations of the Alien and Sedition Act during World War II then later exonerated when the judge "died" suddenly during the appeal I think. Smith, Draper, Vonsiatsky and Pelley were part of both The Ashville "Nazi" Conference and "The Plot to Seize the White House" against FDR which was detailed by Jules Archer. This plot involved putting in Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler as the proxy President. Butler fought all the Banana Wars for Boston Fruit, later United Fruit which was started by Andrew Preston from Boston, a cousin of Wickliffe Preston Draper who taught all the tricks about Cotton plantation slaves and Banana Plantation slaves to Andrew Preston. The Drapers and the Prestons owned both Mississippi cotton plantations, Latin American Banana plantations and later New England based company town textile mill slave plantations. Smith was also active with The America First Committee, headed by textile millionaire William Regnery and Gen. Robert E. Wood and Col. Robert McCormick, too, most of whom later served with Angleton, Cline, Morris and Willoughby on The American Security Council in the 1960's. Talk about robber barons, the Drapers and the Prestons with the Forbes, the Cabots, the Lodges, the Paines and the Osbornes all mostly Tories from England fighting AGAINST the upstart colonists in the New World wrote the book about being an anti-Union robber baron for over 150 years. Draper actually enlisted in the British Army during World War I and served at a British outpost in India as an observer during World War II.

Here are some article clips from the Robert Morris file... most relate to anti-MLK articles. MORRIS, ROBERT - [1-85-0-5-1-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [1-85-0-9-1-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [1-85-0-70-11-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [1-86-0-9-1-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [3-16A-2-76-2-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [6-0-0-27-5-1-1] MORRIS, ROBERT - [13-59-0-53-2-1-1]

Wow, this is one very important find, Dave. Billy James Hargis from Willoughby's Anti-Communist Liaison Committee of Correspondence and Robert J. Morris who was Chief Counsel for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, plus Joseph A. Milteer and Edwin A. Walker all rolled into one ball of wax. Remember it was The Constitution Party or The Constitutional Party of the USA which met in Wichita, Kansas in both 1963 and 1965 according to Epstein and Forster at the Town & Country Hotel (was it?) and that meeting was theoretically tied into the Winnipeg Airport Incident as a hypothesis for the payoff meeting discussed there. And Wesley Swift was once the personal bodyguard of Rev. Gerald L K Smith from The Christian Defense League where both were members. Plus GLK Smith was postulated by me, as an attendee at the Winnipeg Airport Incident, too, as a dead ringer for the person Giesbrecht mis-identified as David Ferrie. And yet another reference to Guy Banister, whom I believe ran the satellite office for the MissSovComm out of New Orleans. Banister applied for that job in a letter posted by Dave Boylan earlier this year. And the reference to "the Patriot Organizations over the country" is in synch with the Milteer statement "...the Patriots are in the clear on this, it will be blamed on the Communist group..." and the Dick Russell informant statement: "EVEN PATRIOTS CAN NOT TAKE THE LAW INTO THEIR OWN HANDS." These White Christian KKK Patriots did the deed and they were paid by Wickliffe Preston Draper himself. End of story.

My thought is that either Marina and/or Ilya Mamantov and/or Igor Voshinin her ...ahhhh so-called "verbatim translators" were in on the Oswald legend building process and that hers was a marriage of convenience as cruel as that sounds. And there is no one around who would ever be able to confirm that what Marina said was actually translated "verbatim" by her "translators". When I asked her about the conflict and the inconsistency between what was translated to the WC about how the bathroom door opened "IN" to the bathroom but she was quoted as "PUSHING" on the door with all her might in order to keep Oswald "IN" the bathroom so he could not go out and take a pot shot at Walker or whatever, she just hemmed, hawed and harrumphed... then she looked very guilty and trapped, then immediately excused herself and went back into the live conference to avoid answering the question, even though the conference in Cambridge was not yet in session. My conclusion is that even that guy who "wrote" her bio then trashed it into oblivion, Isaac Don Levine, yet another White Russian Fascist, was just doing a debriefing on her to see what she knew or what she figured out after she was under contract so no one else could do her bio for life. How convenient! Marina just went along to go along, and probably was in on the entire game somehow. Her uncle was with the NKVD and she must have known what Oswald was up to all along. No hard proof, just a very logical inference, IMHO. She framed Oswald in the Walker shooting against all evidence, then backtracked and now says her husband was innocent of all crimes. Sniff! Sniff! Not too believable.

I have been looking into all aspects of "The Ghosts of Mississippi" since about 1994 as you know including my testimony in front of the ARRB in Dallas about James Eastland and Robert Morris. My testimony about Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms got cut onto the editing room floor, but Joe Knapp remembers that audible gasp from the audience when I started naming names on the record. Three days later Helms made that threat against Clinton coming into North Carolina so I had to back off that approach. When I called up eventual Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Blackmon after the published the June 11, 1999 WSJ article about Draper's funding of the MissSovComm, he went to my ARRB testimony on line and was just totally amazed that I was on to Draper and Eastland 5 years before any documents were released by the MissSovComm. Most of it was done on the basis of Eastland's work for the Draper Genetics Committees as part of SISS, but the lion's share was based on the word of the person Mary Ferrell called her "best informant" Roy Hargraves, Hemming's buddy who was known as the "California Bomber." Too bad the ARRB was shut down well before the MissSovComm was really opened up in the 1998-1999 timeframe. I think that was probably deliberate. I was told at the time that both SISS and HUAC were "deliberately and intentionally" exempted from the JFK Records Act. And Susan Klopfer thinks that the MSC files were picked clean between 1995 and 1999 by the insiders before they went truly public. Banister flew to Greenwood, Mississippi with DeLesseps Morrison in 1956 to visit Eastland, on yet another secretive mission which was just before the MSC was started as I recall. And Eastland was behind most if not all of Oswald's New Orleans based legend building: Clinton, LA - Kleins Sporting Goods and now even the FPCC leafleting campaign run by Banister, according to Anthony Summers when he interviewed Banister's secretary, Delphine ?? was it? For my money, whoever built Oswald's legend in New Orleans did it through SISS which meant only Eastland, Morris, Sourwine or Dodd were involved with Banister who also was seen in Clinton, LA with Ferrie for the voter registration drive. Plus Ed Scannell Butler, as you mentioned for the N.O. radio interview who was yet another Eastland and Patrick Frawley, Jr. gopher. Frawley hired Morris at Technicolor and at Schick when he could find no other work for a while. INCA, DINKA DOO. Alton Ochsner, too. Some day soon, Paul Weyrich's prediction about Wickliffe Draper will become a generally accepted historical principle: "When the role of The Pioneer Fund and Wickliffe Draper in the historical events of the 20th Century are fully understood and recognized, all of the world's history books will have to be re-written from scratch." That includes most, if not all, of the JFK history books, too. Start writing.

Dave, Informing on whom and for what purpose? What do you make of the Oswald FPCC leaflet campaign, the Klein's Sporting Goods rifle purchase, and the Clinton, LA voter registration drive now that it is apparent that Banister also worked for Senator James O. Eastland at SISS and even at the MissSovComm as well, according to Susan Klopfer and others, too? Certainly someone in that New Orleans and Mississippi nexus of characters was in charge of setting up Oswald big time and it had to come from the top with Eastland telling Banister and others what to do on a step by step basis regarding the Oswald "legend" and its construction. Looks like Banister applied for and got a job under Eastland at the MissSovComm, most likely as chief investigator. What do you, or anyone else, make of all this, in light of the fact, that Sourwine, Morris, Weyl and others were apparently following Eastland's lead at Operation Red Cross as well? Weyl said that the CIA was kept out of Operation Red Cross at the direct behest of Eddie Bayo Perez and his associates. If you can not assassinate JFK's character using Operation Red Cross, then what is the next logical step? JFK: The Final Solution.

Dave, welcome back. Was there a date on this letter and where did you find it? Funny how a lead from a non-JFK researcher, like Susan Klopfer, can vault someone like Guy Banister right into the Top Ten operatives list in a heartbeat. His role in the ACL of the Caribbean was even more massive than I ever realized as a matter of fact, even though I was the only one highlighting his efforts there. Isolating him as being close to the SISS or SISSY crowds, is also a major breakthrough, too, with the likes of Sourwine, Eastland and Robert "McCarthyism" Morris. And how about what Nathaniel Weyl said about Operation Red Cross, yet another Eastland and Goldwater operation? This looks more and more like the classic "Et tu, Brute?" Caesar, Brutus and the Roman Senators operation to me. Beware the Ides of March. March 22 was Draper's favorite Day of Denouement. What new things have you discovered recently about the JFK hit?

Thanks Dean. From my past experiences with FPCC this flyer seems genuine. Harry I trust your judgement Harry Whoever said that the life and times of Guy Bannister should be looked at in detail, is a pretty sharp chap. As usual the problem, is that there is a lot of spiderwebs to weave in and out of regarding him and his "associates." Take Bannister's ONI credentials. I would love it if one person could prove conclusively his being, "once ONI, always ONI." Even though it is important to remember finding factual evidence of a conspiracy, is the goal in that regard, and not getting into endless point-counterpoint "road to nowhere" forum postings, there are some rather incredible assertions re Bannister and his "near the end of his life activities." Submitted for your approval...... In the saga of the JFK assassination, there are several intelligence agencies that recieve scant attention, at least factually compared to the Agency, which has been written about extensively in comparison.....albeit with good reason A trifecta? How about the Office of Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and Field Operations Intelligence. Digressing, there is an allegation that Layton Martens mother had foreknowledge, to a degree of plans to assassinate JFK, and that she was placed in a mental hospital not once but twice, and that Guy Bannister was involved in the subject matter. This is as described in The Dealey Plaza Echo Vol 11, Number 1 March 2007 See page 13 of Rose Cheramie by John J. Johnson If this is true that would tend to validate a certain amount of material that has been written about the Big Easy in "those days." Seems like there has been a considerable negative imprint here on the forum the last few months, I suppose thats what happens when the resident bull in the china closet, is given carte blanche.....I guess the old adage about squeaky wheels is true..... Another informative piece of information of sorts, if one is interested in Oswald and the Great Game, is The Secret Services Handbook - Michael Bradley with Thomas Carmichael http://books.google.com/books?id=iWWaTQH5ikgC&dq= If you agree that some things not publicized are more than worthwhile, the book seems to fit that category.... Dealey Plaza was almost 50 years ago, but the great game goes on and on......... Let's hear it for the proverbial 'Bull in the China Shop', yours truly, without whose persistence, this entire JFK Conundrum could have gone on for yet another 50 years. And let us thank John Simkin for opening up this thread again because he realized how important the role of Guy Banister was in the entire JFK proceedings, not only in New Orleans, but through the Southern US and Latin America. And let us also thank Susan Klopfer, who works with a group of Civil Rights Cold Case volunteers as well. Without her, it might not have become so abundantly clear that among other things, William 'Guy' Banister was first and foremost the private detective of choice for every single pro-Segregation, anti-Semitic, anti-Civil Rights proponent throughout the Southern States touching the Gulf of Mexico. She also pointed out that Banister was on the payroll of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission for Senator James O. Eastland, along with Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker during both the Ole Miss Riots and the Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation crisis. Recall also that it was Walker who often visited Byron De La Beckwith in prison following the murder of Medgar Evers, Jr. and that it was none other than Jack Ruby who fingered Walker in his Warren Commission testimony. And how long was it the Banister's role in the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean was totally ignored, almost deliberately, 40+ years, perhaps? And how many of you knew that Banister played a role with E. H. Hunt in the 1954 Guatamala coup of Arbenz run with 'Rip' Robertston and Allen Dulles, along with his United Fruit Company client which was less than a mile from his offices on Lafayette Street on St. Charles? Not many, I would venture to say. And when the information about 'Operation Red Cross', also run by Senators Eastland and Goldwater, and NOT the CIA was painstakingly extracted from Nathaniel Weyl, how many of you said: "Wow, everyone always said that one of the main keys to the understanding of the sponsors of the JFK hit was 'Operation Red Cross', now that we know it was done by SISS, under the auspices of Senator James Eastland from Mississippi who was on Draper's payroll, for the benefit of Senator Barry Goldwater from YAF and organized by Robert Morris from SISS and The China Lobby, who was the real force behind McCarthyism, this puts the entire JFK Assassination in a much clearer, brighter light!" No one besides me. Why does it take a Civil Rights Activist to bring us all back to our senses to realize that the JFK murder and the other 3 acts of violence done between the Summer of 1963 and the Summer of 1964 were all done by the SAME forces, paid for by the SAME person, Wickliffe Draper, for the SAME reasons using the power behind Senator James O. Eastland, the Senator from The Pioneer Fund? Even Jackie Kennedy said something to the effect: "What a shame that he had to die at the hands of a little nobody like Oswald instead of at least for a more nobler cause like 'The Civil Rights Movement'." Looks like Jackie was right after all, and it looks like those like Bill Baggs, Editor of The Miami News whom I had the privilege to work for at the age of 16, and Ralph McGill, Editor of the Atlanta Constitution were also right when they said the JFK murder was first and foremost perpetrated by those in the Civil Rights movement for their own sinister purposes. Sure, it also served the purposes of the Viet Nam lobby, the MIC, the anti-Semites, the anti-Papists, the anti-Catholics, but who actually represented ALL of these interests and was in a position to reach deep down into his pockets and deep down into his hierarchy of KKK stormtroopers and the Gestapo of the Southern Civil Rights opponents? Only Wickliffe Preston Draper, using Senator James O. Eastland from the MSC, the KKK and the Draper Genetics Committee and Robert J. Morris whose history included Rapp-Coudert, McCarranism, The China Lobby, the Liberty Lobby, McCarthyism, MacArthurism and then SISS with Eastland as well. Trust me, without my contributions, Robert Morris, Charles Willoughby, Wickliffe Draper, Edwin Walker and even James Eastland and Guy Banister would have gone totally scot free. You are welcome. You are all very welcome.

Stephen, do you happen to know which book of Groden's it was where that color image was published? In The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald, (Penguin Books 1995, p 66) Groden writes "In June he was on the streets of New Orleans passing out the leaflets. Hand-stamped on the first batch was the address 544 Camp Street. All later handouts bore either his Magazine Street address or post office box number 30016." Stephen, if Groden's above claim is correct, how did Martello get one in August? On page 68 Groden repeats the claim and reproduces the stamped Camp Street address, but there is no picture of the leaflet. In the above mentioned book, Groden does reproduce Commission Exhibit 3120 (The Crime Against Cuba) and it does show the Camp Street address. It doesn't seem to appear here: http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/...Vol26_0405b.htm Of course when he testified before the Warren Commission, Martello told Wesley Liebeler: "I turned the original paper over to the United States Secret Service along with the pamphlets, all of the pamphlets." My favorite Martello quote was this: "Well, as far as being capable of an act, I guess everbody is capable of an act, but as far as dreaming or thinking that Oswald would do what it is alleged that he has done, I would bet my head on a chopping block that he wouldn't do it." http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/w...Vol10_0035a.htm Finally, Gus Russo does print an alleged photo (attributed to the National Archives) of the handbill with the name L. H. Oswald above the 544 Camp Street address, but his account of the entire episode does not seem complete or even credible. First he explains that Oswald "didn't claim Banister's address as his own." Then on the next page, Russo posits that Oswald used the Camp Street address in order to embarrass Banister. Russo writes that shortly before his death in 1964, Banister offered that explanation to his brother Ross. Russo also concludes: "After much contention, it has become clear that Banister had nothing to do with Oswald or any Kennedy assassination attempts." Yep: 321 St. Charles Ave. (United Fruit) to 544 Camp Street (Banister/FPCC address) is only about 1/2 mile or less as the crow flies... Google Map it. Looks like one of my purloined citations dug out from the deep recesses of my mind has caused a little maelstrom of controversy here. Now I realize why Russo is: [always] [sometimes] [never] (circle one) considered unreliable regarding his ultimate conclusions and stacking of the evidence into deviously distorted and convoluted facts. Anyone care to pitch in on the links of Banister via his Anti-Communism (or Anti-Communist) League of the Caribbean into all the regime changes he is alleged to have participated in involving "Banana Wars" and "Banana Dictators" over the years including the E.H. Hunt coup for United Fruit against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatamala? The office of United Fruit built in 1920 was right on East Charles St. near the offices of Banister after all. And what do you make of the possible sinister roles of Banister, SISS and/or Eastland in the Klein's Sporting Goods fiasco, in the Clinton, LA voter registration drive or in the Oswald leafleting campaigns? Seems to be a pattern here. When you combine that with the brand new discovery of Banister's role with Draper's MissSovComm, DeLesseps Morrison and Eastland you have to reach the almost inescapable conclusion that Banister was knee deep into some really deep and sinister events and people.

For a full text searchable index of Nazi Hydra in America click here: http://www.5000watches.com/NaziHydra George Seldes Facts and Fascism... How much do you really know about the Roots of the Fascist inspired JFK plot? If GLK Smith is not on your radar then the answer should justifiably surprise and embarrass you. Ever read David Boylan's article about the Christian Defense League, Winrod, Swift and Smith? Well, read it. The Roaring 20s and the Roots of American Fascism Part 5: Preachers & Klansmen In 1924, the Hearst papers, the American Legion, and the Ku Klux Klan led the charge for the Americanization" of schoolbooks, loyalty oaths for teachers, and harsher immigration legislation. These three organizations would become deeply tied to fascism in the following decade. Several members of the American Legion were involved in the fascist plot of 1934 against FDR. The Hearst papers would become an open propaganda outlet for the Nazis and fascism. The Klan would go on to form an alliance with the American Bund. Hearst with Nazi officers W.J. Simmons, a former Methodist circuit rider from Atlanta, established the second Klan in 1915. The original Klan had died out and disbanded. The second Klan would be disbanded later on, only to be reborn again. In the first four years of rebirth, the Klan was relatively small. Not until 1920 did it grow to mammoth proportions. Two factors with roots in the late 1800s set the stage for the rebirth of the Klan. The first was massive immigration from Europe. The American Protective Association, formed in 1887, was virulently anti-alien. The group was particularly strong in the Midwest, where the Klan became strong in the 1920s. The other factor was the populist movement of the 1890s which sought to unite blacks and poorer whites against mill owners and the conservative elite of the South.57 The Klan remained relatively small through 1919. It wasn't until Simmons met publicists Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler in 1920 that the membership increased, peaking at around 4,500,000. The huge increase in Klan membership was largely a product of the Red Scare. Simmons had a contract with the two, giving them 80 percent of all membership dues. Clarke and Tyler promoted the Klan as rabidly pro-America, anti-black, anti-Jewish, antiunion, and most importantly, anti-Catholic. The race riots in the summer of 1919 also contributed to the rapid growth of the Klan in 1920. In 1919, race riots occurred in Chicago, Washington DC, Elaine, Arkansas, Charleston, South Carolina, Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee, Longview, Texas and Omaha, Nebraska. Through the first half of the decade, the Klan would be a serious force in both the North and South. The message from the new Klan was that it meant business. Many people believe the Klan was just a bunch of racist, hooded night-riders. The reality is that the Klan has always been closely associated with religion. Besides blacks, Jews, and immigrants, the Klan attacked bootleggers, dope dealers, nightclubs and roadhouses, violations of the Sabbath, sex, and so-called scandalous behavior. The early 1920s saw a rash of lynchings, shootings, and whippings; the victims were most often a Black, Jew, Catholic or immigrant. Additionally, women of scandalous behavior, as determined by the Klan, were subject to abuse. In Alabama, a divorcee was flogged for remarrying. In Georgia, the Klan, led by a minister, administered 60 lashes to a woman for the vague charge of immorality and failure to go to church. In Oklahoma, Klansmen whipped girls found riding in automobiles with young men. In the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Klan flogged and tortured women for morality charges.58 In Chicago, Miss Mildred Erick was beaten almost into unconsciousness, and had crosses carved on her arms, legs, and back by Klansmen. The Klansmen's attack was provoked by her conversion to Catholicism.59 In November, 1921, a case in Asheville, North Carolina became the focus of the national media. The Reverend Abernathy, of the First Christian Church, sent a letter to city officials calling for a purity campaign and the arrest of two women, Etyln Maurice and Helen Garlington, and two black men, Louis Sisney and Maurice Garlington. The women were charged with prostitution, fornication, and adultery. Both women received a sentence of one year in the county jail.59 The campaign was similar to an earlier one in Athens, Georgia launched by the Reverend M.B. Miller of the First Christian Church. Miller headed the Klan in Athens. There are thousands of examples of women receiving much harsher treatment than the Asheville case. What brought Asheville to national attention is that Asheville was the home of William Dudley Pelly and the Silver Shirts. Many of the regions in which the Klan were strong in the 1920s later became centers of pro-fascist groups in the 1930s. Pelly would later move his Silver Shirt organization to Indiana, an area that had a strong Klan in the 1920s. With its anti-black, anti-union, anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Jew, and extreme nationalist agenda, the Klan's platform was remarkably like that of the Nazis. By the 1930s, the Klan served as a bridge between nativist groups and fascists. On August 18, 1940, the Klan formalized an alliance with the American Bund at the Nazi encampment of Nordland, at Andover, New Jersey. Before this, a Nazi agent had offered former Klan Grand Wizard Hiram Evans $75,000 to control the Klan's voice. When James Colescott succeeded Evans, the Klan entered into its collaboration with the American Bund. After the alliance with the Bund was formed, the Klan embarked on a plan to infiltrate unions in an effort to Americanize them. After Pearl Harbor, the Klan intensified these efforts, particularly in the Detroit area. Once inside the unions, Klansmen spread pro-fascist literature, and succeeded in provoking wildcat strikes to hinder the war effort. Their efforts went so far as to organize opposition to purchasing war bonds. Probably the Klan's most successful effort to disrupt the war effort was the Detroit riot. This Klan-inspired riot was an attempt to prevent blacks from occupying their new homes in the Sojourner Truth Settlement, a housing project. The riot caused several deaths, and an interruption of war production. Amplifying its effect, the riot was of tremendous propaganda value to America's enemies. Germany and Japan seized on the riot, and aired lurid broadcasts of it to demoralize American troops.60 Today, one cannot understand the Detroit area without looking at the influence of fascism in the area. The riot was provoked by the Klan which was closely associated with fascism and the Bund at the time. However, there were many other fascist organizations active at the time within the Detroit are. The Black Legion, the Wolverine Republican League, Father Coughlin, and several other fundamentalist ministers of hate as well be shown later in this chapter. Michigan was one of the hot spots for fascism as several of the strongest supporters of fascism within the halls of congress came from Michigan. Detroit was not the only riot inspired by the Klan designed to stop war production. Another Klan-inspired race riot occurred on June 15, 1943 in Beaumont, Texas. A mob of over 4,000 attacked the black section of the city, looting stores and burning buildings. Twenty-one people were killed, and production in the area was slowed for months. Today's modern, or the third Klan formed an alliance with neo-Nazis domestically, and in England, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. An American sergeant stationed in Bitburg served as the Klan's recruiting officer in Germany. Currently, much of the hate and pro-Nazi literature in Germany (where it is illegal) comes from the United States.61 Klan-inspired lynchings and riots were common in the 1920s. Over 450 people were lynched; almost all were black.63 Lynchings became so frequent that Representative L. C. Dyer of Missouri introduced a bill in 1921 to make lynching a federal crime. The bill passed the house but failed in the Senate, due to a filibuster by southern senators. Lynching was not the only method the Klan used to dispose of blacks. On December 9, 1922 a mob in Perry, Florida burnt a black man at the stake after he was accused of murder.64 The most noted act of Klan-inspired violence was in Rosewood, Florida, which was chronicled in a recent film. In January 1923, the tiny town of Rosewood came under attack by a white mob. The mob was incited by a report of a white woman having been assaulted by a black man in the nearby town of Summer. The riot resulted in several residents of Rosewood being murdered, and the black portion of town being burnt to the ground. The black residents, fearing for their lives, fled into the nearby swamps and relocated. No charges were ever filed against the mob, which was reported to have had several Klansmen from outside the area. Although Rosewood is the most widely known race riot of the 1920s, it was not the bloodiest. The Tulsa, Oklahoma riot of 1920 was far more horrific. A mob of over 10,000, some wielding machine guns, attacked the black section of the city, destroying thirty-five square blocks, and leaving over 300 dead. The mob used at least eight airplanes to spy on the blacks and may have even used the planes to bomb some areas.65 The listing of all the race riots and lynchings of the 1920s would fill several volumes. Many, such as Rosewood, were reported nationally. The Nation reported that the state of Florida was unconcerned about the fate of Negroes. A few northern newspapers decried the massacre, but most adopted a more apologetic view of the Klan and its violence. The Tampa Times justified it by proclaiming that blacks "are anything but a Christian and civilized people." The Gainesville Sun went even further, stating that lynchings would prevail as long as criminal assaults continue on innocent women, and closed the editorial equating the massacre with the death of a dog. Today, most peoples' image of the Klan is one of a violent gang of racists clothed in bed sheets, and view the Klan as a pariah of some sort. Even with the rise in membership since 1980, the Klan is still a shadow of its former self. However, the real legacy of the Klan is not related to hooded nightriders or cross burnings. Rather, the real legacy is the role the Klan played in developing what now constitutes the religious right. It was common place in the 1920s for ministers to lead the local Kaverns. The same holds true today. One such example is the Reverend J.M. Drummond, who was the keynote speaker at a Klan rally near Estill Springs, Tennessee on July 7, 1979.66 Drummond is an Identity minister, as is Pete Peters, another minister closely associated with the Klan. The Identity religion teaches that Aryans are the true Jews of the Bible, and that Jews, Blacks and other minorities are children of Satan. Two of the more influential developers of the Identity religion began their ministries in the 1920s. The Red Scare of 1919 resulted in the purging of anyone holding even the mildest liberal views, clergy included. With few liberal clergymen remaining, the result was a gigantic chasm into which the Klan and the radical right moved, shifting the spectrum to the far right. The result can still be seen today in the linkage between racism and religion. A study conducted in the 1960s detailed this linkage, and will be presented in a later chapter. Since that study, the linkage has become even more pronounced, with the rise of the Identity religion in recent years. The evolution of the present religious right from the 1920s Klan can best be shown by the careers of Gerald Winrod and Gerald Smith. In November, 1925 in Salina, Kansas, Winrod established the Defenders of the Christian Faith. The Defenders were extremely conservative, and in April, 1926 Winrod began publishing a monthly magazine, The Defender. Winrod supported prohibition, and was rabidly opposed to the theory of evolution. The teaching of evolution, as well as the Scopes trial, was one of those issues that become a watershed event in shaping later movements. The teaching of evolution would define what has evolved into the religious right. Although there were fundamentalists before the 1920s, the fundamental religious movement was revitalized and defined by the Scopes trial. In fact, the term "fundamentalist" was coined in the 1920s. Many early fundamentalists, such as John Franklyn Norris, were openly supportive of the Klan. Norris was a Baptist preacher from Texas, and also had a parish in Detroit, flying between the two cities. Norris also ran a seminary, one notable graduate of which was John Birch. Birch's death at the hands of Chinese communist forces in the late 1940s spawned the formation of the John Birch Society in the 1950s. In 1926, Winrod led a campaign to ban the teaching of evolution locally, as well as in California and Minnesota. He appointed a committee to examine textbooks, and in Minnesota he helped William Bell Riley draft the bill which was introduced in the Minnesota legislator. Riley was a force in the conservative wing of the Baptist Church during the 1920s. Like Winrod, Riley was rabidly opposed to the teaching of evolution, and was also extremely anti-Semitic. In 1934, he published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an article on communism, attempting to show they were part of a conspiracy at work in Roosevelt's New Deal. Riley preached: "Today in our land many of the biggest trusts, banks and manufacturing interests are controlled by Jews. Most of our department stores they own. The motion pictures, the most vicious of all immoral, educational and communistic influences, is their creation."68 The above quote, from one of Riley's sermons, is indistinguishable from Hitler's propaganda. It is a clue that, if Riley was not outright pro-Nazi, he certainly harbored sympathy for fascism. Riley was not the first clergyman to tout the Protocols. On February 12, 1919, the Reverend George Simons testified in front of the Senate's Overman Committee, shocking listeners with the tale of a secret worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Simons cited the Protocols as evidence. It is generally assumed that Simons obtained his copy of the Protocols from Dr. Harris Houghton of military intelligence. Houghton had obtained his copy from the Czarist immigrant Boris Brasol.17 With his congregation of 3,500, Riley exerted tremendous influence in the upper Midwest. Jewish leaders regarded his church as the center of the area's anti-Semitism. However, Riley's influence extended far beyond his area and time. In 1902, Riley founded Northwestern Bible Training School, which in 1935 became the Northwestern Theological Seminary. He also assisted in the preparation of The Fundamentals, a statement of fundamentalist belief. Just before his death, Riley placed the leadership of Northwestern under the direction of Billy Graham. On March 2, 2002, the ghost of fascism came home to roost on the head of Riley's chosen successor, Billy Graham. On that day, an additional 500 hours of Nixon tapes were released. In a 1972 conversation between Nixon and Graham, the preacher expressed his contempt for, as he saw it, Jewish domination of the media. Graham is heard on tape saying referring to a Jewish owned newspaper: "his stranglehold has got to be broken or this country is going down the drain." Later in the conversation, Graham expresses further opinions about Jews: "They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to control them."74 In response to the new revelations, Graham apologized profusely, claiming a lack of memory of the incident. This latest example of Billy Graham's anti-Semitism should come as no surprise to those that have followed his career. Graham's career has been marked with similar incidents. In the 1950s, Graham was embroiled in an incident revealing his anti-Semitism. The incident stemmed from his portrait gracing the cover of the January 1957 issue of The American Mercury, and his friendship with the Mercury's owner, Russell Maguire. Maguire had acquired a huge fortune from oil and munitions. Maquire owned the company that made the Thompson submachine gun, and had acquired the Mercury in 1952. In 1951, Maquire donated $75,000 to Billy Graham to produce a film extolling the virtues of free enterprise and the development of God-given natural resources. The film Graham produced was called Oiltown, USA. Graham continued his friendship with Maguire after producing Oiltown, and wrote several articles for the American Mercury. By the time Graham's portrait graced the Mercury's cover, the magazine had earned a reputation as overtly anti-Semitic and hard right. Maguire and the Mercury were ardently anti-communist, and also called for the abolition of the income tax, the UN, NATO, the ACLU and Zionism. Throughout the 1950s the Mercury, under the guidance of Maguire, supported Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other writers for the Mercury included J. Edgar Hoover, Ralph de Toledano and George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. De Toledano's resigned from the OSS after refusing to work with liberals. Maguire was an open backer of fascism and fascist organizations, and was an early supporter of Rockwell. Rockwell often complained about Maguire's miserly donations. By January 1957, the Mercury was at loggerheads with the Anti-Defamation League over charges of anti-Semitism. Despite their public apologies, the religious right and Billy Graham cannot rid themselves of their past support of fascism and anti-Semitism any more than a leopard can change its spots. Conservative theological circles today still regard Riley highly, carefully sweeping his collaboration with the Jayhawk Nazi, Winrod and his anti-Semitism, under the rug. Yet, anti-Semitism is still present in the Baptist church. Like many right wing groups, today the Baptist church cloaks its anti-Semitism behind a thin veil. It comes bubbling to the surface in the position the Baptist church has adopted in recent years of reaching out to Jews so they may be converted to Christianity. Jewish leaders describe this program as condescending. It is also manifested in the strong support for Israel due to the misguided beliefs of many of the fundamentalists. The reconstructionists a sub branch of the religious right believe the end of the millennium marks the end times and the approaching battle of Armageddon with the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Winrod's lingering influence and anti-Semitism were also readily apparent in the 1980s in Kansas. At that time, Kansas became a hotbed of support for the Posse Comitatus, a far right-wing, extremely anti-Semitic group. The Posse Comitatus, which was founded by a former Silver Shirt leader, subscribes to the Identity faith. Nor is this the end of the Winrod continuing influence. In March 2001, Winrod's son Gordon, now age 74, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for kidnapping six of his grandchildren. The children had been living in North Dakota. Windrod's two daughters assisted in their kidnapping and were brought to trial separately. The children have received mental health treatment after being returned to their fathers. The younger Winrod began buying land in Ozark County, Missouri in the 1960s and eventually opened a church he called Our Savior, in which he preached his hate of the Jews. Winrod's congregation consisted mostly of his adult children and a few followers. Two or three times a year he would mail every resident of the county his Winrod Letter, despite numerous complaints. During his trial he repeatedly referred to the proceeding as a "Jewdiciary."76 The Posse's rise to popularity in the Midwest, and in Kansas in particular, provides another example of how, old prejudices, hate and fascist leanings lingers on for generations. Indeed, racism in Kansas can be traced back prior to the Civil War. Further evidence of Winrod's lingering influence on Kansas is seen in the 1999 attempt by the Kansas Board of Education to ban the teaching of evolution. Although Winrod claimed he was not a member of the Klan, he did nothing to oppose the group.69 During the 1920s an estimated 100,000 residents of Kansas were Klan members. In the 1924 race for governor, both Democratic and Republican candidates sought the Klan's support. There was a solid base of support in Kansas at the time for candidates that attacked Catholics and Jews. Winrod would depend on that base in his later run for senator. It wasn't until the 1930s that Winrod adopted full-blown fascism as his ideology. After 1934, Winrod accepted the Nazi's justification for their anti-Semitic policies. His view was that the Nazis were only acting to save Germany from Jewish radicalism, economic exploitation and racial lust. In 1935, Winrod called Hitler a devout Catholic.69 Eventually, Winrod was indicted for sedition in the 1940s. An even more direct link between the 1920s and today's far right groups can be established by tracing the origin of the Identity religion. The Identity religion is based on racial hatred, and has been adopted by many current far right groups including the Aryan Nations, the Posse Comitatus, various Klan klaverns and militias. Reuben Sawyer, the pastor of Portland, Oregon's East Side Christian Church, was the first to combine the Klan with Identity religion. Sawyer was instrumental in the British Israel Federation, and during the 1920's was a popular speaker in the Pacific Northwest. It was out of the British Israel Federation that the Identity religion emerged. Sawyer was a leader of the Klan in Oregon, and the founder of its women's auxiliary. Besides being the first to combine the Klan and what was to become the Identity religion, Sawyer was the first to combine anti-Semitism with anti-communism, as the following quote illustrates: "Jews are either Bolshevists, undermining our government, or are shylocks in finance or commerce who gain control and command of Christians as borrowers or employers. It is repugnant to a true American to be bossed by a sheenie. And in some parts of America the Kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk on the sidewalk. And where they are so thick, it is Bolshevism they are talking. Bolshevism, and revolution"70 It was from such views that the Identity religion developed. Among those credited with its founding was a young minister, Gerald Smith. Smith began his ministries in Soldier's Grove, Wisconsin, by revitalizing a Disciples of Christ congregation. In 1923, Smith accepted a pulpit at the Seventh Christian Church in Indianapolis. He soon built the congregation to over 1,000. At the time, the Christian Evangelist noted that Smith a prominent figure among the Hoosier Disciples. As the 1920's progressed, he moved to other pulpits in the Indianapolis area. In 1929, he left Indiana for the Kings Road Christian Church in Shreveport, Louisiana. While at the Kings Road church, he worked with the Klan, not against it. Smith's self-promotion and social activism soon alienated many of his wealthy backers. Soon, Smith aligned himself with one of the most notorious fascists of the time, Huey Long. In 1934, he resigned his pulpit at Kings Road to work with Long's Share the Wealth organization. In 1936, Smith endorsed Eugene Talmadge, the racist governor of Georgia, for reelection, and also aligned himself with another well-known fascist, Francis Townsend. In 1939, Smith met Merwin Hart, head of Utica Mutual Life, and soon received support from the New York Economic Council. No doubt, Smith's campaign against the CIO figured prominently in the decision to support him. Living in Michigan at the time, Smith began broadcasting on WJR, a station owned by an enemy of Roosevelt. There he received further support from such leading industrialists as the Dodge and Olds brothers. In 1938, he supported the campaign of Arthur Vandenberg, a senator with fascist leanings. Smith also cultivated a friendship with Henry Ford. In 1942, the FBI received a tip that Winrod helped Smith start The Cross and Flag, a notorious fascist publication that continued well into the 1960s. Following WWII, Smith moved to California, and founded what has become the Identity religion. In the 1960s, Smith moved to Arkansas, and started several grandiose projects, one of which, the Christ of the Ozarks, was completed in 1966. It was soon followed by a Bible museum. Smith's legacy is his founding of the Identity religion, a religion based solely on hate, teaching that Aryans are the true Jews of the Bible, and that Jews and other minorities are children of Satan. The Identity religion has became almost universal among far right groups today. It acts as the glue holding the various factions of the far right together and to justify their hate.

Beg to differ. I think we know Banister now about as well as we are ever going to know him, IMHO. And this new information which I have slowly dredged up about his little known roles with the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean and WACL (c. 1995), with SISS (c. 2000), with United Fruit and the Guatamala coup (c. 2005), and now with Wickliffe P. Draper and James O. Eastland and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (c. 2010) really cements his role as the primary New Orleans operative in the whole JFK conundrum and maybe even more. Anyone who attempts to trivialize his role by saying he was expendable is also being a bit disingenuous. It was critical to snuff him out before Garrison got to him, because he will go down in history as one of the Top Ten ground level operatives and controllers while I still think that David Ferrie and even Jack Ruby were truly expendable little pipsqueaks who talked too much. Banister, however, was a violent and unpredictable psychotic with truly pivotal and crucial roles to fulfill in the JFK plot, which was always a risky proposition for everyone involved. He knew more about the multiple tiers and the roles of some of the really major players than almost anyone else outside of Condon's Dirty Dozen. I mean his offices were in the same building with Brig. Gen. "Fighting Frank" Bonner Fellers and his For America and TMA operations as well as Oswald's FPCC operations and just around the corner from United Fruit and the Dulles brothers operations. Name anyone else with deeper or wider ranging connections. Anyone. And to say something like: "Well he died broke and behind on the rent, therefore he never got paid off appropriately for his pivotal role in the JFK hit, so it must not have been very pivotal after all." is also disingenuous. GLK Smith never got a dime for his Christ of the Ozarks or broke ground until perhaps June or July of 1964, he just started out with more money in the bank than Banister ($5,000.00 as of 12/31/1963) but they were both nearly destitute and very open to any mercenary operation to fill their coffers before retirement. And I am sure that Banister had been promised hundreds of thousands of dollars after the fact by the Draper forces. Just because he never lived to collect it does not exonerate him from culpability in the act. In fact, killing him was not only a good investment but a mandatory safeguard against further leaks during drunken revelries.

Todd: My belief, for many years, was that the 544 Camp address appeared only on the Lamont "Crime Against Cuba" pamphlets. I was startled when Groden published a color image of one of Oswald's FPCC leaflets with the 544 address, and I wondered if it was a fake, or some artifact from the Stone film. Then Gus Russo printed one of Oswald's leaflets with the 544 address. My understanding is that it was real, that it was acquired from Oswald by NOPD officer Francis Martello when Oswald was arrested in New Orleans but kept by him for posterity, and that it ended up in the posession of Martello's widow. I understand there are also more of them. All this from a respected researcher. Thank you for this updated info, Stephen. I know that I always sometimes never <grin> imagine things, at least in this case. Whenever someone uses phrases like "none of the pamphlets contained..." or "no one ever produced a pamphlet with..." or "there never was a pamphlet with..." I know that they are just blowing smoke and ascribing a much more omniscient and omnipresent perspective to themselves than anyone else would ever consider applying to them. Happens all the time in this research business. Never say never, as they say. Seems ironic that it would take a slightly distorted quotation by a 3rd party non-JFK researcher, like Civil Rights Cold Case investigator Susan Klopfer, made by my alter ego from 15 years ago, to get me back onto the trail of Guy Banister and his multiple roles in the JFK conundrum. And for me to reopen the books on Guy Banister ONLY because he crossed paths with so many of my primary suspects and closely associated fiends, mainly the Wickliffe Draper, Andrew Preston, James Eastland, E.H. Hunt, Julien Sourwine and Robert Morris nexus of characters inolved with SISS and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission may seem a bit disingenuous to some, but I think it is fully justified, given the depth and breath of research I have put into this group. Some of them, like the Drapers and the Prestons, have family ties to both United Fruit known as "El Pulpo" (or the Octopus) going back to about 1900 or even earlier with The Boston Fruit Company, including the use of their personal military attaches Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler of The United States Marine Corps, a young Douglas MacArthur and others like Matthew Ridgeway or George Patton who built their military careers, apparently as the bought and paid for little biatches for United Fruit in Latin America. Then to find out that Gen. Smedley Butler, J. P. Morgan, John J. Raskob from Chase Bank, Gerald Maguire and Wickliffe Draper were involved with "The Plot to Seize the White House" by Jules Archer in the 1930's just sort of seals the entire deal up in a nice neat package. Then if you consider that the path from Gerald Maguire against FDR through Russell Maguire against JFK who owned The American Mercury right after Clendenin J. Ryan owned it, you realize that this business of organizing coups against Presidents is a family business and a heritage going back 75 years or more. With Wickliffe Draper, if you count his relatives assault and murder against Lincoln over the issue of their quasi-monopolistic cotton and slave trade issues you are talking about 150 years of Regicide. "Thomas Ryan, who had financed the operation, died in 1928 and his son disposed of Auto-Ordnance Corporation. When the company was sold to Maguire Industries, Thompson lost control. The firm was to remain in Russell Maguire's hands until 1951 when it was sold to George Numrich, Jr. of the Numrich Arms Corporation." When you consider that it was Clendenin J. Ryan's grandfather Thomas Fortune Ryan who financed Thompson for his submachine gun project right after the first World War, you realize how important Clendenin J. Ryan's financing of Ulius Amoss' and Carleton Coon's ISI operations really were in fact. Amoss and Coon INVENTED the concept of programmed assassins using ManCand techniques, with Robert Emmett Johnson and perhaps even Gerry Hemming and Lee Harvey Oswald as 3 of their prized pupils, and it was inherited by Ray S. Cline after that in Baltimore. Doug Caddy indicated that he started YAF with funding from Charles Edison and the encouragement from his college roommate Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr. of course, not only started YAF, but worked for The American Mercury under Ryan, but was joined there by George Lincoln Rockwell and L. Brent Bozell his brother in law. Another Buckley brother in law, Gerald O'Reilly was President of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation during their MK/ULTRA research at Bridgewater State Hospital. Smedley Butler bailed out Pantapec Oil and Buckley's father's other interests in Mexico and E. H. Hunt bailed out United Fruit's and the Dulles brothers' interests during the Jacobo Arbenz coup in Guatamala. Of course, Buckley was the godfather to E. H. Hunt's children, a self-admitted JFK conspirator who often frequented by neighbor's childhood home in Miami, Florida. Hunt was the classmate of both Anastase Vonsiatsky and George Lincoln Rockwell at Brown University in Providence, RI and of course, we all known now that Vonsiatsky was THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE from Condon's novel of the same name. (Whew!) Thank you for following along at home, boys and girls. And representatives from the Draper, Buckley, Willoughby and McCormick families all rode against Pancho Villa in Pershing's Punitive Campaign against that "bandito." Now you know why Richard Condon mentioned the likes of Buckley, GLK Smith, Oliver, Draper, MacArthur, Willoughby, Robert Morris and others in his novel, or do you? More on this Smedley Butler quote: "I was a Racketeer and Ganster for Capitalism..." Smedley Butler on Interventionism -- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. --SOME BACKGROUND-- The corporate Robber barons tried to stage a coup and take over the FDR presidency. They were angry about the New Deal and wanted to take over the Executive branch. The supposed people behind the coup were JP Morgan, the Duponts, the Remington Steel interests and others. They had a middle man (name escapes...Gerald Maguire?) who met with Colonel Butler on a number of occasions to hopefully bring him on board to implement the coup. Butler was the highest ranking military officer at the time, and he was also the most respected and revered by troops nationwide. The corporate "boys" concluded it was necessary to bring him on board to initiate and rally the troops to do their bidding, which apparently was to send 500,000 troops to Washington D.C. and I would assume the White House. Butler listened during the meetings, extracting as much of the information that he could. Then he went to a reporter for a Philadelphia paper and a New Jersey (i think) senator and proceeded to lay out the entire plan that had been place in front of him. It's public record, although, it remains noticebly absent from history books. Smedley Butler should have a monument in D.C. right next to Lincoln's. Perhaps he will some day.

Come on, Duncan, we all humored you and talked you down from the ledge as you were pursuing the UFO angles, right? The least you can do is to give Doug Horne the opportunity to state his case, and to analyze the work as an entirety. Almost everyone gets a few factoids just a little bit off. Can you forgive him just a few of these debatable, subtle items in something well over 2,000 pages? I mean you neglected to account for something as simple as the fact that the bus was actually in motion between photos, and that the scratch or smear or the hair on the window or on the camera lens would actually appear to change it's relative position in the process. I mean for a while there while following that UFO thread, I first thought that you were just kidding and spoofing the concept of off-the-wall research, then I actually thought you were just pulling some kind of Philip J. Corso PsyOps, mind control accidental or on purpose mind games like "War of the Worlds" by Orson Welles turned out, albeit inadvertently, either just for the actual exercise or for the fun of it, and then finally I realized that you were dead serious but still managed somehow to withhold the full force of my usually acerbic wit. So cut Doug Horne a little slack, please. It is a monumental work after a monumental effort and while I do not necessarily even follow or begin to comprehend the medical evidence due to my own personal reasons, that is no reason to just blatantly write it off as a worthless effort. Spring for the $85.00 and give it a thorough read. Just cancel out a few of those Sci-Fi magazine subscriptions or some of those UFO pay-per-view web sites you frequent, and you should have it all just about covered. 1) Ever been to Area 51 in New Mexico? Got any pictures? 2) Do you believe that Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso actually attended an Alien Autopsy as he claims? 3) Have you ever attended an Alien Autopsy, invited or otherwise, and did you take any pictures? 4) Did the aliens take any pictures of you during this alleged Alien Autopsy? Who were the surgeons? 5) Have you or anyone else you know or talked to, ever been beamed up into an Alien Spacecraft? 6) If so, could you share with us for the benefit of mankind, the interactions which occurred? 7) Did you ever hear the one about the interaction between the couple from Venus and the Iowa farming couple who engaged in the first ever recorded Inter-Galactic or Inter-Planetary wife-swapping exchange? The punch line is: "That Venutian woman almost twisted my damn fool ears off!" Just curious. Cheers!

Craig, do you believe in the existence of a conspiracy, and if so who are your Top Ten suspects who could be indicted today, given the current state of the evidence, if they were not already otherwise rendered into dust?

Check out the updates to the Guy Banister thread. Turns out now that he was knee-deep with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission funded amost 100% by Wickliffe P. Draper and started or operated by Senator James O. Eastland from Mississippi. Banister was also involved with the Guatamala coup against Jacobo Arbenz with E. Howard Hunt and Allen Dulles and many other operations done by the United Fruit Banana Wars Gang via his Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean for years. Banister was also part of The John Birch Society, the Minutemen, the Little Rock, Arkansas desegregation campaign and even The Jung Hotel meeting with Walker and Leander Perez the week before JFK died.

And it seems he died a bankrupt. According to Harold Weisberg (I think it is in Oswald In New Orleans) Bannister was many months behind on his office rent when he died. THis indicates that Bannister is one person who did not profit from the JFK assassination, and that fact -- plus the absence of reliable evidence against him -- makes him a most unlikely suspect, IMHO. As loose a cannon as "Sparky" Ruby, Banister may just have been cut out of the loop along with other embarrassing Cuba invasion types, before his inevitable termination. Or the non-payment may have been meant to hasten his death - Banister was something of a walking heart attack (the Martin assault, the gun discharge on duty), and a heavy drinker to boot. Take a look at the evidence below which documents what I believe to cement Banister as one of the Top Ten most pivotal participants in the conspiracy in fact. And since I have some several very personal experiences with how the anti-Castro Cuban exiles promised all sorts of rewards and payoffs to more than one South Florida SOF or gun-runner, after performing some very risky, life-threatening, precarious and self-incriminating boom and bang operation or transportation task only to withhold the promised payments after that you might want to reconsider your rather primitive cause and effect analysis and conclusions. Here is a conversation related to me by a wanna-be SOF after dealing with these anti-Castro exiles... SOF: "But you said you were going to give me $5,000 after I finished this operation! You bastidges!" Exile: "Here is $1,000. Take it or leave it!" SOF: "Why you SOB I am gonna... I will tell... " Exile: "Oh yeah! Who you goin' to tell, gringo? Who can you tell? Stupido! You goin' to go to jail if you tell anyone about what you did. You are more guilty than we are."

Someone recently published an image with a rubber stamped address 544 Camp St. on an alleged FPCC leaflet signed or stamped by the FPCC president, whomever it was at the time. (F. T. Lee (?)) Are you saying that it is a forgery or that you have just never seen this item to be able to determine its authenticity? The Bringuier office address residence was taken from a posting on John Simkin's webpage on Banister, citing some 3rd party author as I recall. Have you read that page recently, and if you did why did you not question that posting? Just curious. So what is your conclusion about Guy Banister and his ascribed roles with United Fruit, The Boston Fruit Company, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the Ole Miss Riots, the Little Rock Arkansas High School Desegregation, the John Birch Society, WACL, Edwin A. Walker, Leander Perez and the Jung Hotel Meeting, The Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean, SISS with James O. Eastland and Robert J. Morris, DeLesseps Morrison, Brig Gen Bonner Fellers and For America, plus Ten Million Americans (TMA), the Guatamala Coup with E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertston and Allen Dulles? Do these pass muster with you? Just curious. Here is just one of 5 authors who cite this rubber stamped 544 Camp St. address (on a Corliss Lamont FPCC pamphlet) I am going with Bill Davy's reference. Chapter Four: The Return of Lee Harvey Oswald by Bill Davy he Bolton Ford episode was not the only event to indelibly link Guy Banister with the accused assassin. In April of 1963, Oswald returned to the city of his birth. By May 9th he had found work at the Reily Coffee Company, conveniently located two blocks from Banister’s offices. Its owner, William B. Reily, was yet another right-wing reactionary. Reily provided financial support to such groups as Arcacha’s Crusade to Free Cuba and Ed Butler’s propaganda outfit, INCA.(1) Oswald’s employment at Reily’s lasted until July 19th, when he was let go, supposedly for spending too much work time next door at Adrian Alba’s garage. The Crescent City Garage was home to the local government agencies’ motor pools. One day Alba recalled observing an FBI agent handing a white envelope to Oswald, who was standing in front of Reily’s. Alba watched as Oswald clutched the envelope close to his chest and walked back into Reily’s.(2) One of the things about Reily’s that later aroused Garrison’s suspicions was the number of employees that left shortly after Oswald’s departure to begin careers in the aerospace industry. For example, Oswald’s superiors, Alfred Claude and Emmett Barbee both left Reily’s in July and went to work for NASA in eastern New Orleans.(3) Two of Oswald’s co-workers, John D. Branyon and Dante Marachini, were also later hired by NASA.(4) Marachini is of particular interest since he was a self-described friend of David Ferrie’s as well as Clay Shaw’s next door neighbor.(5) A vice-president of Reily’s who testified before the Warren Commission, William Monaghan, was a former career FBI man who left the bureau to become an executive with Standard Fruit.(6) After his stint at Reily’s he, along with William Reily’s brother, Eustis, show up on the board of directors of Aaron Kohn’s Metropolitan Crime Commission.(7) According to an INCA bulletin from 1962, Monaghan is listed as a charter member of that organization as well. All of this peculiar activity led Garrison to surmise that Reily’s was part of an intelligence apparatus. Recent file releases seem to bear out Garrison’s suspicions. A CIA memo dated January 31, 1964 reads, "this firm [Reily’s] was of interest as of April 1949."(8) Also according to this memo, Reily’s was assigned Agency number EE-334.(9) In addition, career soldier-of-fortune and CIA contract employee, Gerry Patrick Hemming confirmed that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years.(10) After his departure from Reily’s, Oswald began what Bill Turner wittily describes as his "guerrilla theater" on the streets of New Orleans—touting his one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee and distributing pro-Castro literature amid this hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment.(11) On August 9th, Oswald was attacked by Carlos Bringuier and other Cuban exiles as he was handing out his literature, complete with pro-Castro placards, on Canal Street. Oswald had visited Bringuier’s clothing store four days earlier offering to train members of Bringuier’s exile group, the CIA funded Cuban Student Directorate or DRE. Oddly, at approximately the same time Oswald was engaging in his gratuitous picketing, Ferrie, along with several anti-Castro Cubans, was taking part in his own "counter" demonstration, also on Canal Street.(12) After the Canal Street fracas Oswald was arrested and taken to the police station where he promptly asked to speak to an FBI agent. The following morning John Quigley was dispatched and interviewed Oswald at some length.(13) Quigley also retained some of Oswald’s one-sheet Fair Play For Cuba flyers and other materials. Oswald normally rubber-stamped these sheets with either his name or "FPCC" and also his home address or a post office box number. However, on this occasion he also handed out a 40-page pamphlet written by Corliss Lamont, entitled, The Crime Against Cuba. The usual rubber stamp adorned this literature as well, except it read: FPCC 544 Camp Street New Orleans, LA What the FBI and the Secret Service would later discover (and what Quigley must have surely known) was that 544 Camp was the side entrance to 531 Lafayette. In the summer of 1963, 544 Camp housed just three tenants: a restaurant worker’s union, a railway union, and Guy Banister Associates. Strangely, this was the only incident where Oswald used the Banister address. Another curious sidebar to this affair is that Oswald wrote to the FPCC headquarters in New York informing them of his street altercation. In his letter Oswald wrote, "Through the efforts of some exile "gusanos" [a derogatory term for anti-Castro exiles, literally translated as "worms"] a street demonstration was attacked and we were officially cautioned by police. This incident robbed me of what support I had leaving me alone. Nevertheless thousands of circulars were distributed and many, many pamphlets which your office supplied..." The problem with this letter was that it was written on August 4th, five days before the incident actually occurred.(14) What is also odd about this affair is the pamphlet itself. Written by a well-known New York peace activist, the tract was critical of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1963 the pamphlet had already gone through four printings. However, the copies that Oswald distributed were from the first printing of June of 1961, a period that found Oswald still in Russia. In 1961 a large bulk order for this first printing came directly from the Central Intelligence Agency.(15) On August 16th Oswald once again hit the streets, this time distributing his FPCC materials in front of the International Trade Mart, then managed by Clay Shaw. However, the supposedly impecunious Oswald had hired two individuals from the local employment agency to assist him.(16) Local news cameramen captured this event for posterity on film. Curiously, Clay Shaw’s right hand man, Jesse Core, had summoned the cameras.(17) Prior to this incident and just after the Canal Street demonstration, Oswald received a visitor at his home. Carlos Quiroga was a mutual associate of both Carlos Bringuier and Sergio Arcacha. Bringuier stated he sent Quiroga to Oswald’s home in an effort to "infiltrate" Oswald’s communist cell. According to Bringuier, Quiroga brought with him a couple of the sheets Oswald had dropped on Canal Street. But there are two reasons why this incident is suspicious. First, both Bringuier and Quiroga lied to the Warren Commission by telling them this event occurred after the Trade Mart demonstration.(18) Secondly, Oswald’s landlady, Mrs. Garner observed Quiroga when he arrived at the Oswald home. According to Garner, Quiroga did not have one or two "Hands Off Cuba" sheets, but rather a stack five to six inches thick.(19) As journalists Ray and Mary La Fontaine and others have noted, it seems more likely Quiroga was delivering the pamphlets rather than attempting to infiltrate the FPCC. In fact, Quiroga was given a polygraph exam by Garrison’s office and sent the needle off the chart when he answered "No" to the question, "You have said you tried to infiltrate Oswald’s "organization." Isn’t it a fact that you knew that his "Fair Play for Cuba" activities were merely a cover?"(20) So what was Oswald’s purpose in using the 544 Camp address? Was he trying to embarrass the notoriously right-wing Banister? Or was he in fact an operative in the Banister cell? There is compelling evidence that strongly indicates the latter. Oswald and 544 Camp Street Delphine Roberts, Banister’s longtime secretary, mistress and confidante, revealed to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and later to British journalist, Anthony Summers, that Oswald walked into Banister’s office sometime in 1963. He was given a form to fill out as one of Banister’s "agents."(21) After Oswald filled out the form, he met with Banister behind closed doors. According to Roberts, "Oswald came back a number of times. He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office. As I understood it he had use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked...Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba."(22) Roberts’ daughter, also named Delphine, told Summers that she and a photographer friend also saw Oswald at Banister’s on occasion.(23) Further corroboration of Oswald’s second floor offices comes from former Banister associate Bill Nitschke. In a 1967 interview with a New Orleans States Item reporter, Nitschke revealed that sometime before the Kennedy assassination, he visited Banister’s office and the second floor anterooms. Nitschke recalled seeing crudely lettered placards that he believed had something to do with Castro. He told the States Item that "it didn’t make any sense to me how Guy got tied up to those signs."(24) As a side note, Nitschke also recalled Delphine Roberts telling him that Banister, Ferrie, and sometime Banister operative and pilot, Hugh Ward, were all involved in running guns to Miami and other places.(25) Dan Campbell, an ex-Marine that worked for Banister infiltrating left-wing groups on college campuses confirmed the gunrunning, recalling that "Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami."(26) Campbell also assisted Banister in small arms training for the Cubans and received $50 per week for his services.(27) Campbell’s recollection of Banister is telling. He describes Banister as "one of the most frighteningly violent persons I have ever known."(28) The Banister menagerie he added "were the worst kind of fanatics."(29) Campbell also remembered one day when he was in Banister’s office and a young man came in and used the phone. "I knew he was a Marine from his bearing and speech pattern the minute he walked into 544 Camp Street," he recalled.(30) The next time he saw this young man was when his picture was on television as the accused assassin of President Kennedy. Interestingly, Campbell also recalled seeing Oswald’s buddy from his Marine Corps days, Kerry Thornley, pop in and out of Banister’s office.(31) Strangely enough on the day Kennedy was shot Thornley was with Allen Campbell, Dan’s brother.(32) Allen, like his brother, also worked for Banister. On one of the days Oswald was handing out his leaflets, Allen remembered Delphine Roberts returning to the office and complaining to Banister that "that young man is passing out pro-Castro leaflets in the street."(33) Allen recalled Banister’s reaction was calm, "Don’t worry about him. He’s a nervous fellow, he’s confused. He’s with us, he’s associated with the office."(34) This cavalier attitude on the part of Banister was confirmed by George Higginbotham. Like the Campbells, Higginbotham was also assigned to infiltrate supposed communist groups. Banister even went as far as providing him with false credentials. Higginbotham remembered bringing the Oswald leafleting incident to Banister’s attention. Banister’s response was, "Cool it. One of them is one of mine."(35) Former Banister investigator Vernon Gerdes, who later went to work for New Orleans attorney Stephen Plotkin, told Plotkin that he had seen Oswald and Ferrie together with Banister.(36) Plotkin would later tell an attorney for Clay Shaw that he considered Gerdes "reliable."(37) William Gaudet, a twenty-year CIA veteran who worked out of the International Trade Mart, told Anthony Summers that, "I did see Oswald discussing various things with Banister at the time," and added, "I suppose you are looking into Ferrie. He was with Oswald."(38) Finally Gaudet said, "Another vital person is Sergio Arcacha Smith. I know he knew Oswald and knows more about the Kennedy affair than he ever admitted."(39) Jack Martin, who we saw earlier suffered at the hands of Banister, provided a statement to the New Orleans DA’s office that he had seen Oswald with Ferrie in Banister’s office in the summer of 1963.(40) Additionally, Banister’s wife recalled seeing Fair Play for Cuba sheets in Banister’s office.(41) Infiltrating left-wing groups with his agents provocateur was a particular specialty of Banister’s. Tommy Baumler, a New Orleans attorney, revealed in a 1981 interview that he too worked for Guy Banister, joining left-wing college groups and reporting back to Banister. Baumler also recalled that "Clay Shaw, Banister, and Guy Johnson made up the intelligence apparatus in New Orleans."(42) Johnson was a former Lieutenant Commander in the Navy in World War II and a former assistant D.A. in New Orleans from 1938-1942. In 1950, he was granted a Top Secret clearance by the Office of Naval Intelligence, while working out of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.(43) Johnson later went into private practice as an attorney, but it is not known when his intelligence career ended.(44) In a letter from Banister to Johnson, dated January 5, 1959, Banister discusses the possibility of hiring a candidate for his infiltration squad. Banister writes: We have discussed the advisability as well as the feasibility of establishing certain channels of information and it is possible that the above named individual will qualify... Mr. Bergeron, in the course of conversation, advised that he served in the Air Force and had just gotten out and entered school. He said he served in the security section and has atomic clearance. I mentioned, during the conversation, the United States National Students Association and he said that he heard someone mention this organization on Channel 12 (WJMR-TV, the Citizen’s Council Program) and said that he had checked and found that there is a small organization on the campus. If it is satisfactory and you can determine this individual’s reliability, I will set him up to begin work with me and pass on to you any information he produces.(45) Finally, evidence of Oswald’s association with the Banister clique, may have come from the CIA itself. In an intriguing, but incomplete, memo from April 9, 1968, someone at the CIA wrote: Moreover, until then, there had been no secret as far as anyone was concerned in regard to the fact that Banister, David William Ferrie and Subj. [Oswald] may have known or been acquainted with one another.(46) It should be noted however, that this is the exact same wording from an affidavit from Jack Martin. So it seems the CIA was quoting from Martin’s affidavit in this memo rather than stating their own conclusion.(47) At the end of August Oswald made a memorable appearance in Clinton, Louisiana, which we will examine in detail in Chapter 11. In September Oswald left from New Orleans for Texas, by way of Mexico City. He eventually found work at the Texas School Book Depository and settled in Dallas to await the denouement to this strange play, whose opening act may have begun that summer in New Orleans. Let Justice Be Done. Order your copy today!

United Fruit and The Banana Wars new internationalist issue 317 - October 1999 The Battle of the Banana Corporate coups and the rise and fall of political regimes - all par for the course in the ongoing war to control the banana trade. Business in bunches In 1870 Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker landed the schooner Telegraph in Jamaica and saw that bananas were popular on local markets. He purchased 160 bunches for one shilling per stalk on Port Antonio docks; 11 days later he sold bunches for two dollars each in Jersey City, making a huge profit. The legendary bounty of the banana trade was established. Bananas were shipped to Boston and New Orleans from Cuba and the Dominican Republic as well as Jamaica. By 1898 some 16 million bunches were being imported into the US. Uncrowned king In 1899 the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was formed in Boston and began to develop its own plantations in Central America. In Costa Rica, Minor Keith did a deal with the Government to build - with great loss of life - a railway to the Atlantic coast and planted bananas beside the track. He married the daughter of the President and became known as the 'Uncrowned King of Central America'. UFCO's 'Great White Fleet' totalled 95 ships by 1930. Panama disease or wilting first destroyed banana farms in 1900, and continued to create major problems for UFCO's banana plantations thereafter. Sam the Man Samuel Zemurray - 'Sam the Banana Man' - went to Honduras in 1905, where he financed a coup that brought very favourable concessions for his developing banana business. He pioneered new plantation techniques, and in 1915 began production from large new landholdings in the Motagua Valley, on the disputed Honduras/ Guatemala border. In 1930 United Fruit bought out Zemurray's holdings for $31.5 million; in 1933, as the largest shareholder, he became UFCO's Managing Director. By then the company owned plantations the size of Switzerland in Central America and the Caribbean. Imperial unease The British Government became worried about US influence in its Caribbean colonies. In 1901 it provided a large subsidy for the Elder Dempster shipping company to begin a refrigerated service to Jamaica (pictured right). In 1913 the Fyffes company was created for the banana trade, but it ran into financial difficulties and was taken over - by United Fruit. The Imperial Economic Committee in London reported in 1926 that an 'organization under American control monopolizes the whole supply of bananas from Central America and Jamaica to the United Kingdom'. A strategy of providing financial assistance to associations of banana growers, who would supply the British market independently of UFCO, was implemented. By 1938 Jamaica produced 78 per cent of British imports. War of the Worlds The Second World War brought the banana trade to a halt - boats were requisitioned for the war effort and shipping was disrupted, causing great hardship in the region. In 1945 bananas returned again to Britain, shipped from Jamaica under the control of the Ministry of Food. The Moyne Commission published its pre-war findings on the dreadful conditions in Britain's West Indian colonies. It recommended financial support for small-scale banana production, particularly in the Windward Islands. On 6 December 1950 a ship arrived at Liverpool from Sierra Leone with a cargo of bananas of which 78,000 were too ripe; 3,000 dock workers were asked to eat all they could and got through 37,000. The British taste for bananas had survived the war. Carve-up In 1952 the British Government 're-privatized' the banana industry. Imports paid for in US dollars - which, in bankrupt Britain, were extremely scarce - required a licence. In 1954 Geest, a company owned by Dutch brothers based in Britain, signed a ten-year contract with all the growers' associations operating in the Windward Islands. In 1958 the Windward Islands Banana Growers' Association (WINBAN) based in St Lucia was formed. By 1959 banana imports to Britain had for the first time surpassed the pre-war high. Between 1964 and 1966 a mini Banana War broke out between Geest and Fyffes, who eventually agreed to split the British market between them. In 1969 Fyffes unilaterally broke its contract with Jamaica, importing low-cost fruit from Côte d'Ivoire and Surinam instead. Miss ChiquitaMiss Chiquita UFCO launched a 'Miss Chiquita' (pictured right) advertising campaign in the US in 1944. Technical changes were also made to the production process. In 1961 bananas were pre-cut and placed in boxes instead of bunches, to protect against bruising. Following a period of unrest on its plantations, in 1954 the company orchestrated a coup against the Government of Guatemala. After an anti-trust suit in 1958, UFCO was slowly broken up into the 'Big Three' banana companies. Between them, they increased their domination of the European market, by now the world's largest importer. All three were subsequently absorbed into a succession of multinational conglomerates. Bust and boom The Windward Islands faced two major setbacks in 1973; the oil crisis which increased the cost of shipping and chemical inputs, and the accession of Britain to the European Economic Community. Here it joined France, whose 'Overseas Departments' in Martinique and Guadeloupe were guaranteed two-thirds of the French banana market. Britain negotiated a 20-per-cent tariff on 'dollar' bananas. Then, in 1975, the first Lomé Convention guaranteed 42 former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific ('ACP') trading terms on a par with the best of the preceding years. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s a 'banana boom' swept the Windward Islands. Rules of engagement In 1992 the Single European Market and European Union (EU) were designed to remove internal trade barriers. A single new banana 'regime' imposed tariffs and quotas for each exporting country, overall quotas for 'dollar' bananas and 'traditional' or ACP countries, plus additional tradable licenses. Chiquita decided to oppose the new EU regime altogether at the World Trade Organization (WTO) after it was established in 1995. On three separate occasions the WTO has found against the EU regime. In early 1999 Chiquita persuaded the US Government to impose punitive import tariffs on EU imports. The latest skirmish in the Banana War continues, with another adjudication from the WTO expected in November. During the 1990s, however, an increasingly effective international network of trade unions, campaigns, organic and fair-trade producers has joined the fray to change the rules of engagement. Sources: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, Sinclair Browne, London, 1982; Lawrence S Grossman, The Political Ecology of Bananas, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1998; Green Gold, Latin America Bureau, London, 1987.

Selective commentary on John Simkin's page on William "Guy" Banister (also sometimes misspelled "Bannister") whom I now believe played major behind-the-scenes roles with General Edwin A. Walker's insurrection and treason efforts at both the Ole Miss Riots; at the Little Rock, Arkansas desegregation attempts; at the Jung Hotel meeting in New Orleans run by Edwin A. Walker and Leander Perez; with Senator James O. Eastland and Wickliffe Draper at both the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the Draper-Eastland Genetics Committee at SISS; as an investigator for SISS for both Robert J. Morris, the chief counsel to McCarthy, Eastland and Dodd; with Lee Harvey Oswald to formulate his legend during the FPCC leafleting campaign, during the Clinton, LA voter registration drive, and during the Klein's Sporting Goods rifle purchase ruse run by Senator James O. Eastland to further incriminate Oswald well in advance of his role as either a "patsy" or a hypnotized (by Ferrie) or programmed assassin; with E. Howard Hunt, and perhaps even Allen W. Dulles and "Banana Sam" Zemurry plus the Prestons and the Drapers including the Forbes, the Paines, the Cabots and the Lodges from United Fruit including "Rip" Robertson during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatamala in 1954 via his Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. The oriental dude, photographed near Oswald during the FPCC leafleting campaign was probably some sort of representative from the Asian People's Anti-Communist League who wanted to prove how Oswald could be made to perform on command, by incriminating himself as a pro-Communist, all the while acting as a programmed agent or puppet on a string. Banana Sam Zemurry - How United Fruit Shaped the World The offices of United Fruit (nee The Boston Fruit Company c. 1900) were either in the same complex or very near the Banister Detective Agency headquarters in New Orleans and Banister used Maurice Brooks Gatlin as his attorney and confidante, the same lawyer used by Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers to incorporate his For America and Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Justice at the very same Banister complex. Fellers was involved in Cairo, Egypt with both Major Carleton S. Coon (OSS) and Brig. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg in covert actions also involving mind control, programmed assassins and similar activities later taken over by Clendenin J. Ryan and Uliuss L. Amoss of the OSS. Coon's pistol was used to assassinate Admiral Darlan, the Vichy French leader, perhaps by Coon or by an associate of his. Fellers was exposed by me and several others as the inside source who relayed all of Monty's tank movements in nearby Northern Africa right through James Angleton in Rome and back to the fake "Desert Fox", Edwin A. Rommel. Folks, this newly coalesced information is SO BIG that you may find it difficult to swallow at first gulp. And I never would have re-opened my examination William "Guy" Banister had it not been for a posting made by Susan Klopfer on the "Mississippi Roots of the JFK Assassination", which oddly enough, was inspired by my original testimony to the ARRB about 15 years ago. "Banister moved back to Louisiana and in January 1955 became Assistant Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department where he was given the task of investigating organized crime and corruption within the police force. It later emerged that he was also involved in looking at the role that left-wing political activists were playing in the struggle for black civil rights in New Orleans." And apparently Banister did the same work in Arkansas, Mississippi and maybe even Texas and Alabama. "Banister developed extreme right-wing views and worked as an investigator for the Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee. He also published the racist Louisiana Intelligence Digest. Banister had a deep hatred of the civil rights movement and believed that the policy of racial integration was part of a a plan formulated by Joseph Stalin to create racial conflict in America. Bannister claimed that members of the American Communist Party were involved in a plot to contaminate crops in the United States. He also told the Special Committee of the Arkansas State Legislature that left-wing activists were behind the race riots in Little Rock." Hmmm... typical of Walker, Perez, Eastland and Draper rhetoric. "Banister was suspended by the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) for an incident with a gun in a bar. His suspension ended in June 1954, but when he refused to be transferred to the NOPD's Planning Department, he was dismissed from the force. After leaving the police he established his own private detective agency, Guy Banister Associates." His hot temper got him fired from the FBI and the NOPD and led to Jack Martin ratting him out. "In 1963 Banister and David Ferrie began working for the lawyer G. Wray Gill and his client, Carlos Marcello. This involved attempts to block Marcello's deportation to Guatemala. Later Banister was linked to the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy. On 9th August, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald distributed leaflets that supported Fidel Castro and his government in Cuba. On these leaflets was the address 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. This was also the office of Carlos Bringuier, an anti-Castro exile. Around the corner from 544 Camp Street, located in the same building, was 531 Lafayette Street, which housed the detective agency run by Banister. This raised suspicions that Oswald had been involved in a right-wing conspiracy to kill Kennedy." On the afternoon of 22nd November, 1963, Banister and Jack Martin went drinking together. On their return to Banister's office the two men got involved in a dispute about a missing file. Banister became so angry that he he drew his Magnum revolver and hit Martin with it several times. Martin was so badly injured that he had to be detained in the local Charity Hospital." All very telling and so close to the events in Dallas, that it had to be related to them. "Over the next few days Martin told friends that Banister and David Ferrie had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Martin, Ferrie was the getaway man whose job it was to fly the assassin out of Texas. He also claimed that Ferrie knew Lee Harvey Oswald from their days in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol and had given him lessons on how to use a rifle with a telescopic sight." I used to scoff at this years ago, but now believe it to be true. "On 25th November, Martin was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He told them that he thought Ferrie had hypnotized Oswald into assassinating Kennedy. The FBI considered Martin's evidence unreliable and decided not to investigate Banister and Ferrie. This information eventually reached Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans. He interviewed Martin about these accusations. Martin claimed that during the summer of 1963 Banister and David Ferrie were involved in something very sinister with a group of Cuban exiles. "Jim Garrison now became convinced that a group of right-wing activists, including Banister, David Ferrie, Carlos Bringuier and Clay Shaw, were involved in a conspiracy with the CIA to kill John F. Kennedy. Garrison claimed this was in retaliation for his attempts to obtain a peace settlement in both Cuba and Vietnam." While Banister was not IN the CIA or the FBI he certainly had many, many covert contacts with them. "Delphine Roberts worked for Banister and later became his mistress. Roberts told Anthony Summers that during the summer of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Banister. She said she was in the office when Banister suggested that Oswald should establish a local Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This story was supported by her daughter who met Oswald during this period. Guy Banister died of coronary thrombosis on June 6, 1964." What would the diagnosis have been if H. L. Hunt had someone snuff Banister with his recent favorite little spy toy, the Stashinsky Gun? Hunt was greatly enamored with The Stashinsky Gun as a way to snuff his opponents. Answer: Coronary Thrombosis. (1) Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) To Jack Martin, Banister's private investigator: "I guess I blew up," he continued, his face flushed with memories of injustice. "That's when I told him he'd better not talk to me like that. I told him I remembered the people I had seen around the office that summer. And that's when he hit me. Fast as a flash - pulled out that big Magnum and slammed me on the side of the head with it." "Just because you remembered the people you'd seen at his office the past summer?" I asked. "Yeah, that's all it took. He went bananas on that one." "And just who were the people you'd seen in the office that summer?" I prodded softly. "There was a bunch of them. It was like a circus. There were all those Cubans - coming in and going out, coming in and going out. They all looked alike to me." Someone once commenced that whenever you really want to do something unseen, whenever you go to great pains to make sure that you are unobserved, there always turns out to be someone who was sitting under the oak tree. At the strange place that was Banister's office. Jack Martin, unnoticed in the middle of it all, was the one sitting under the oak tree. He drew a long breath and then went on. "Then there were all these other characters. There was Dave Ferrie - you know about him by now." "Was he there very often?" I asked. "Often? He practically lived there." Then Martin fell silent. I saw by the look in his eyes that he had come to a full stop. I was not about to let my weekend visit to 544 Camp Street go down the drain that easily, so I gave him a hand. 'And Lee Harvey Oswald'" I added. Jack swallowed, then nodded. It was almost as if he felt relief in finally having a burden lifted from him. "Yeah, he was there too. Sometimes he'd be meeting with Guy Banister with the door shut. Other times he'd be shooting the bull with Dave Ferrie. But he was there all right." "What was Guy Banister doing while all this was going on?" "Hell, he was the one running the circus." "What about his private detective work?" "Not much of that came in, but when it did, I handled it. That's why I was there." "So, Jack," I said. "Just what was going on at Banister's office?" He held up his hand. "I can't answer that," he said firmly. "I can't go into that stuff at all." Unexpectedly, he stood up. "I think I'd better go," he said. "Hold on. Jack. What's the problem with our going into what was happening at Banister's office?" "What's the problem?" he said. "What's the problem?" he repeated, as if in disbelief. "The problem is that we're going to bring the goddamned federal government down on our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get killed - and so could you." He turned around. "I'd better go," he mumbled. He wobbled as he headed for the door. Breach of Trust (2) Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980) According to Delphine Roberts, Lee Oswald walked into her office sometime in 1963 and asked to fill in the forms for accreditation as one of Banister's "agents." Mrs. Roberts told me, "Oswald introduced himself by name and said he was seeking an application form. I did not think that was really why he was there. During the course of the conversation I gained the impression that he and Guy Banister already knew each other. After Oswald filled out the application form Guy Banister called him into the office. The door was closed, and a lengthy conversation took place. Then the young man left. I presumed then, and now am certain, that the reason for Oswald being there was that he was required to act undercover." Mrs. Roberts said she was sure that whatever the nature of Banister's "interest" in Oswald, it concerned anti-Castro schemes, plans which she feels certain had the support and encouragement of government intelligence agencies. As she put it, "Mr. Banister had been a special agent for the FBI and was still working for them. There were quite a number of connections which he kept with the FBI and the CIA, too. I know he and the FBI traded information due to his former association...." (3) Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (1968) Guy Banister, a former FBI official and onetime assistant superintendent of the New Orleans police department, had had a 'stormy' career, according to the New Orleans States-Item of May 5, 1967. After he had left police work officially, if not earlier, Banister was active for years as a top U.S. intelligence agent in the South and in Latin America. His spacious office, at 531 Lafayette Street, in New Orleans, served both as a rallying point for Minutemen, Cuban exiles and assorted right-wing and intelligence operatives and as an arms distribution centre for these elements. This has been brought out with dazzling clarity both by the Garrison investigation and through independent research by the local press. A close friend and adviser of Banister's told the States-Item the veteran FBI agent was a key liaison man for U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America, the New Orleans paper reported and added: "Guy participated in every important anti-Communist South and Central American revolution which came along while he had the office on Lafayette Street," the source reported. The paper also stated that Banister is believed to have worked in cooperation with a U.S. military intelligence office here." Hmmm.... Military Intelligence as in Army Intelligence perhaps? Walker, Willoughby? Or Air Force Intelligence and Bonner Fellers whose offices were also on Camp Street with Maurice Brooks Gatlin? (4) William Turner, Rearview Mirror (2001) I walked over to 531 Lafayette Place. There was no inscription on the door denoting it as Banister's business, only a realtor's shingle and a sticker of the then-nascent Republican Party of Louisiana. The door opened to stairs leading to a second-floor space that was unoccupied. Diagonally across the space was a second set of stairs, which led down to a door on Camp Street. The number over the door read "544." 544 Camp Street was the return address Lee Harvey Oswald had stamped on the first batch of pro-Castro literature he handed out on the streets of the Crescent City in August 1963- Subsequent batches bore a post office box number, suggesting that the use of the street address had been a lapse. What was Oswald's connection to Banister? When I reported the Camp Street discovery to Garrison, I recommended that we assign priority to interviewing Banister. Too late, he said, Banister had been found dead in bed in June 1964, his pearlhandled, monogrammed .357 Magnum revolver at his side. Although there was no autopsy, his demise was attributed to a heart attack. But Brooks, who had done some clipping and filing for Banister in 1962, had identified his deputy, Hugh F. Ward, as also belonging to the Minutemen as well as an outfit called the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean, which was headed by Banister after he came to New Orleans in 1955. Brooks credited the ACLC with helping the CIA overthrow the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala, opening the way for a succession of rightist strongmen. The ACLC continued to act as an intermediary between the CIA and right-wing insurgency movements in the Caribbean, including Cuba after Castro gained power. There was a chance that Ward would be willing to talk, but it turned out he was gone as well. On May 23, 1965, he was at the controls of a Piper Aztec chartered by former New Orleans mayor DeLessups Morrison when the craft, engines sputtering, crashed on a fog-shrouded hill near Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, killing all on board. That left Maurice Brooks Gatlin, Sr., an attorney associated with Banister, on Brooks's list of key Minutemen in Louisiana. According to Brooks, Gatlin served as legal counsel to the ACLC. In fact, Brooks had been a kind of protege of Gatlin. The attorney's passport was stamped with visas of countries around the world. In Brooks's estimation, he was a "transporter" for the CIA. On one occasion Gatlin bodaciously told Brooks, "I have pretty good connections. Stick with me-I'll give you a license to kill." Brooks became a firm believer in 1962 when Gatlin displayed a thick wad of bills, saying he had $100,000 of CIA money earmarked for a French reactionary clique planning to assassinate General de Gaulle. Shortly thereafter Gatlin flew to Paris, and shortly after that came the Secret Army Organization's abortive ambush of the French president. But Gatlin as well was beyond Garrison's reach. In 1964 he fell or was pushed from the sixth floor of the Panama Hotel in Panama, dying instantly. As I sat in Garrison's office discussing the fates of Banister, Ward and Gatlin, my mind flashed back to the previous November when Ramparts had run a story on the "mysterious deaths" theory of doughty Texas editor Penn Jones, Jr. With David Welsh, I had gone down to Midlothian, a dusty cotton market town south of Dallas, to meet with Jones on his front porch. He had compiled a list of an unlucky thirteen people who were witnesses to the assassination or somehow touched by it and had died violently or questionably inside of three years, which he saw as a highly excessive actuarial rate. One on the list was Tom Howard, Jack Ruby's initial attorney, who concocted the story that the mobster killed Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a trial (he died of a supposed heart attack). Another was Lee Bowers, who was sitting in a railroad tower behind the grassy knoll and spotted two strange men behind the picket fence on the knoll just as the presidential limousine passed and a flash and commotion ensued (he was involved in a one-car accident). A third was Earlene Roberts, the boarding house manager who stated that Oswald rushed into his room for a few minutes shortly after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, during which a Dallas police car stopped in front and honked twice as if to signal (she was struck by a presumed heart attack). The mysterious-deaths article so fascinated Walter Cronkite that he sent a film crew to Midlothian for a CBS News series on Jones. Although the theory caught on as "evidence" of a conspiracy, I was bemusedly skeptical. But the untimely deaths of Banister, Ward and Gatlin gave me pause that there might in fact have been systematic elimination of people who knew too much. Two months earlier there had been a fourth curious mortality in this set: David William Ferric, an investigator for the ex-FBI official's private detective agency, Guy Banister & Associates. Garrison's interest in Ferrie dated back to the morning after the assassination, when he summoned his staff to the office for a "brainstorming" session to explore the possibility that Oswald had accomplices in New Orleans. Although it would not be known until after the Warren Report was published, on that same Saturday morning the Secret Service was checking out the return address of 544 Camp Street that the accused assassin had rubber-stamped on some of his handouts promoting a rump chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The agents asked the building manager if Oswald "had occupied office space" but learned instead that "Cuban revolutionaries had been tenants until recently." They talked to an exile accountant who revealed that "those Cubans were members of organizations known as 'Crusade to Free Cuba Committee' and 'Cuban Revolutionary Council', which had been headed by Sergio Arcacha Smith, a former Batista diplomat. The agents reported that they had been unable to find any trace of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, evincing no curiosity over why pro-Castro literature would bear the address of anti-Castro groups. On Monday, the Warren Report later disclosed, the FBI's Ernest C. Wall, Jr., a Spanish-speaking agent who liaisoned with the exile groups, called Guy Banister to inquire about Arcacha Smith. According to Wall's single-paragraph report, Banister responded that Arcacha Smith had been the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council and "some time ago had told him on one occasion that he, Smith, had an office in the building located at 544 Camp Street." Nothing about Banister and the Cuban Revolutionary Council, created by the CIA as an umbrella group for the Bay of Pigs invasion, being under the same roof. As a limited hangout, it was a classic. The Warren Report dutifully stated that "investigation has indicated that neither the Fair Play for Cuba Committee nor Lee Oswald ever maintained an office at that address." Convinced yet?