Marita Lorenz

[Tim Gratz]

I recently mentioned purchasing "Marita" by Marita Lorenz and Ted Schwarz. The bookcover gives no information who Schwarz is, BTW.

Which reminds me of a "pet peeve". I think the bios of authors can be helpful but they are usually only printed on the dustcover and not within the book. So if you lose the dustcover you no longer have the author's bio.

Back to the book. She has the car caravan leaving much earler in the week than I thought. So it is not inconsistent with LHO being in Irving on Thursday night. It is however inconsistent with his work at the TSBD that week.

She says passengers in the first car besides herself were Sturgis, Pedro Diaz Lanz and Orlando Bosch.

She puts Ozzie in the second car. Apparently this car also contained (per her) Gerry Hemming (in the book she only identifies him as "Gerry") and the Novis brothers.

She liked Gerry, who she said hated the Novis brothers.

She says that when she became disgusted with what was going on, she left the operation, and, she says, Gerry did at the same time. She says neither she nor Gerry knew what the operation was about.

She says that among the weapons in the cars' trunk were C-4 explosives which, interestingly, she says "could be used for a diversion or to bring down a highway overpass. It would make an excellent car bomb . . ."

She says E Howard Hunt came by early in the morning on Thursday, November 21st and gave Sturgis money. A short time later, a man she later identified as Jack Ruby stopped by. Ruby was disgusted at her presence.

It was on Thursday that she flew back to Miami.

As I recall, in Hargraves' interview with Twyman he states he did not know what the operation was about. Nor does Hargraves place Hemming in Dallas. And of course Hemming denies the whole Marita story.

[Tim Gratz]

Here is Prof McAdams' essay on her story. I post it in part because it contains her deposition. Catch any inconsistencies between the tale in the book and the testimony?

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/denial.htm

[John Simkin]

This article appeared in the New York Daily News on 3rd November, 1977.

Marita Lorenz told the New York Daily News that her companions on the car trip from Miami to Dallas were Oswald, CIA contact agent Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and two Cuban brothers whose names she did not know.

She said that they were members of Operation 40, a secret guerilla group originally formed by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion...

Ms. Lorenz described Operation 40 as an "assassination squad" consisting of about 30 anti-Castro Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco...

She said Oswald... visited an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The next time she saw him, Ms. Lorenz said, was... in the Miami home of Orlando Bosch, who is now in a Venezuelan prison on murder charges in connection with the explosion and crash of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 persons last year.

Ms. Lorenz claimed that this meeting was attended by Sturgis, Oswald, Bosch and Diaz Lanz, former Chief of the Cuban Air Force. She said the men spread Dallas street maps on a table and studied them...

She said they left for Dallas in two cars soon after the meeting. They took turns driving, she said, and the 1,300-mile trip took about two days. She added that they carried weapons - "rifles and scopes" - in the cars...

Sturgis reportedly recruited Ms. Lorenz for the CIA in 1959 while she was living with Castro in Havana. She later fled Cuba but returned on two secret missions. The first was to steal papers from Castro's suite in the Havana Hilton; the second mission was to kill him with a poison capsule, but it dissolved while concealed in ajar of cold cream.

Informed of her story, Sturgis told the News yesterday: "To the best of my knowledge, I never met Oswald."

[Ron Ecker]

There is a lot of valuable info on McAdams's site, but I've noticed that a lot of the articles, like the one Tim linked to above, are anonymously written. Does that mean that McAdams wrote them, and he's too humble to splash his name around on the site, or were they written by people who don't wish to be identified?

Ron

[Ron Ecker]

In the book Kill Zone, Craig Roberts states, "According to Lorenz, the CIA people involved in Dallas traveled clandestinely to a ranch in Mexico to hide out until after Christmas, whereupon they returned to Miami" (p. 69).

As his source for this, Craig's footnote reads "Statement made in the deposition of Marita Lorenz. Plausible Denial, by Mark Lane, pg. 303."

There is no reference on page 303 of Lane's book to Sturgis and the others going anywhere. Does anyone know if such a statement is made in Lorenz's deposition?

Ron

[John Simkin]

According to an account Marita Lorenz gave to Gaeton Fonzi: “A month or so prior to November 22nd, 1963, I joined Frank Fiorini (Frank Sturges), Ozzie (Lee Harvey Oswald), others, Cubans in our group and drove in two cars to the home of Orlando Bosch… This… “highly secret meeting” in Bosch’s home was to discuss certain streets in Dallas, Texas… There was talk of a “highly powerful rifle” and discussions of “feet,” “building,” “timings,” “contacts,” “silence,” etc.” Lorenz went on to claim that she drove to Dallas on the eve of the assassination with Frank Sturges, Orlando Bosch, Pedro Diaz Lanz and “two Cuban brothers whose names she does not know”. Fonzi argues that in this interview “Martia Lorenz had impressed me as a fairly credible witness”. (1)

Lorenz eventually took her story to Paul Meskil of the New York Daily News. On 3rd November, 1977, Meskil published an article that implicated Operation 40 in the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

Marita Lorenz told the New York Daily News that her companions on the car trip from Miami to Dallas were Oswald, CIA contact agent Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and two Cuban brothers whose names she did not know.

She said that they were members of Operation 40, a secret guerrilla group originally formed by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion...

Ms. Lorenz described Operation 40 as an "assassination squad" consisting of about 30 anti-Castro Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco...

She said Oswald... visited an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The next time she saw him, Ms. Lorenz said, was... in the Miami home of Orlando Bosch, who is now in a Venezuelan prison on murder charges in connection with the explosion and crash of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 persons last year.

Ms. Lorenz claimed that this meeting was attended by Sturgis, Oswald, Bosch and Diaz Lanz, former Chief of the Cuban Air Force. She said the men spread Dallas street maps on a table and studied them...

She said they left for Dallas in two cars soon after the meeting. They took turns driving, she said, and the 1,300-mile trip took about two days. She added that they carried weapons - "rifles and scopes" - in the cars...

Sturgis reportedly recruited Ms. Lorenz for the CIA in 1959 while she was living with Castro in Havana. She later fled Cuba but returned on two secret missions. The first was to steal papers from Castro's suite in the Havana Hilton; the second mission was to kill him with a poison capsule, but it dissolved while concealed in ajar of cold cream.

Informed of her story, Sturgis told the News yesterday: "To the best of my knowledge, I never met Oswald."

Statements she made to The News and to a federal agent were reported to Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the Assassinations Committee. He has assigned one of his top investigators to interview her. (2)

Gaeton Fonzi argued that the reason Lorenz had gone to the newspapers was that she feared that G. Robert Blakey would not include her testimony in the House Select Committee on Assassinations report. As Fonzi points out: “Of course, what Blakey had decided, now the story had hit the papers, was that he had no choice but to put the Lorenz tale into the record”.

Lorenz claimed that as a result of this story appearing, Frank Sturges had taken out a contract on her. When Fonzi, Al Gonzales and Eddie Lopez, went to interview her again, she open the door holding a shotgun. “Oh, it’s you, I thought it was a Cuban Frank had sent to kill me.”

Fonzi reports that: “She (Lorenz) looked tired and drawn. She hadn’t slept, and her teenage daughters was out trying to buy a pistol to head off Sturgis before he arrived.” A few days later, Lorenz’s daughter was arrested with a .22 pistol. She said she was “waiting for Sturgis to show up”.

During the interview, with Fonzi, Gonzales and Lopez, Lorenz claimed that Gerry Patrick Hemming was also in the party that travelled to Dallas. Fonzi responded that this made sense as “Sturges and Hemming… had been co-founders of an anti-Castro group”. (3)

In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the Liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had "unexpectedly received an internal CIA memorandum a few weeks ago that the agency just happened to stumble across in its old files. It was dated 1966 and said in essence: Some day we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963 - the day President Kennedy was killed. Hunt is going to be hard put to explain this memo, and other things, before the TV cameras at the HSCA hearings." Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. (4)

The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action.

Mark Lane interviewed Marita Lorenz while preparing his case. Lorenz claimed that E. Howard Hunt had paid Frank Sturgis to transport weapons from Miami, Florida, to Dallas, Texas, in November, 1963. When cross-examined by Kevin Dunne during the trial, Lorenz admitted that Gerry Hemming, Guillermo and Ignacio Novo, also took part in the trip to Dallas. (5)

So it seems that E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Gerry Hemming, Guillermo Novo and Orlando Bosch were all involved in transport weapons from Miami to Dallas. All these men were members of Operation 40.

As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of E. Howard Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA.

Gaeton Fonzi eventually comes to the conclusion that Marita Lorenz was not telling the complete truth about the trip to Dallas. However, his analysis of this event is very interesting: “In retrospect, one result of this whole soap-opera scenario – the factor that still feeds my suspicion of collusion – was a successful diversion, from the Schweiker probe through to the House Assassinations Committee, of our limited investigation resources. And, in the process, it injected a dose of slapstick that would impair any future attempt to conduct a serious investigation into the possible involvement of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in the Kennedy assassination.” (6)

Notes

1. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 83-100)

2. Paul Meskil, New York Daily News (3rd November, 1977)

3. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 101-107)

4. Victor Marchetti, Spotlight (14th August, 1978)

5. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, 1991 (pages 289-310)

6. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (page 107)

[John Simkin]

Namebase entry for Marita Lorenz:

http://www.namebase.org/main3/Marita-Lorenz.html

Assn. National Security Alumni. Unclassified 1994-03 (3-6)

DiEugenio,J. Pease,L. The Assassinations. 2003 (114)

Dinges,J. Landau,S. Assassination on Embassy Row. 1981 (286)

Duffy,J. Ricci,V. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. 1992 (279-81)

Fonzi,G. The Last Investigation. 1993 (83-107, 342-3)

Furiati,C. ZR Rifle. 1994 (122-3)

Groden,R. Livingstone,H. High Treason. 1990 (327, 347-9)

Hinckle,W. Turner,W. The Fish is Red. 1981 (50-3, 214, 340-1)

In These Times 1988-02-23 (5)

Lane,M. Plausible Denial. 1991 (2, 131-2, 150, 188, 288-305)

Los Angeles Times 1977-11-02 (I12)

Los Angeles Times 1977-11-05 (I3)

Messick,H. Lansky. 1973 (239)

Newman,J. Oswald and the CIA. 1995 (108-10)

Piper,M.C. Final Judgment. 1993 (113-5, 200-1)

Spotlight Newspaper 1985-02-25 (90-2)

Spotlight Newspaper 1992-02-17 (12-3)

Stich,R. Drugging America: A Trojan Horse. 1999 (220)

Summers,A. The Arrogance of Power. 2000 (192-3)

Thomas,K. Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader. 1995 (50-1)

Trento,J. The Secret History of the CIA. 2001 (216)

Turner,W. Rearview Mirror. 2001 (198)

Vanity Fair 1993-11 (80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 96, 100, 102, 106, 108)

Washington Post 1987-11-26 (A21)

[John Simkin]

This is Victor Marchetti's article that appeared in The Spotlight on 14th August, 1978.

A few months ago, in March, there was a meeting at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the plush home of America's super spooks overlooking the Potomac River. It was attended by several high-level clandestine officers and some former top officials of the agency.

The topic of discussion was: What to do about recent revelations associating President Kennedy's accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, with the spy game played between the U.S. and the USSR? (Spotlight, May 8, 1978.) A decision was made, and a course of action determined. They were calculated to both fascinate and confuse the public by staging a clever "limited hangout" when the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) holds its open hearings, beginning later this month.

A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

We will probably never find out who masterminded the assassination of JFK - or why. There are too many powerful special interests connected with the conspiracy for the truth to come out even now, 15 years after the murder.

But during the next two months, according to sensitive sources in the CIA and on HSCA, we are going to learn much more about the crime. The new disclosures will be sensational, but only superficially so. A few of the lesser villains involved in the conspiracy and its subsequent coverup will be identified for the first time - and allowed to twist slowly in the wind on live network TV. Most of the others to be fingered are already dead.

But once again the good folks of middle America will be hoodwinked by the government and its allies in the establishment news media. In fact, we are being set up to witness yet another coverup, albeit a sophisticated one, designed by the CIA with the assistance of the FBI and the blessing of the Carter administration.

A classic example of a limited hangout is how the CIA has handled and manipulated the Church Committee's investigation of two years ago. The committee learned nothing more about the assassinations of foreign leaders, illicit drug programs, or the penetration of the news media than the CIA allowed it to discover. And this is precisely what the CIA is out to accomplish through HSCA with regard to JFK's murder.

Chief among those to be exposed by the new investigation will be E. Howard Hunt, of Watergate fame. His luck has run out, and the CIA has decided to sacrifice him to protect its clandestine services. The agency is furious with Hunt for having dragged it publicly into the Nixon mess and for having blackmailed it after he was arrested.

Besides, Hunt is vulnerable - an easy target as they say in the spy business. His reputation and integrity have been destroyed. The death of his wife, Dorothy, in a mysterious plane crash in Chicago still disturbs many people, especially since there were rumors from informed sources that she was about to leave him and perhaps even turn on him.

In addition it is well known that Hunt hated JFK and blamed him for the Bay of Pigs disaster. And now, in recent months, his alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the shooting has come unstuck.

In the public hearings, the CIA will "admit" that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The CIA may go so far as to "admit" that there were three gunmen shooting at Kennedy. The FBI, while publicly embracing the Warren Commission's "one man acting alone" conclusion, has always privately known that there were three gunmen. The conspiracy involved many more people than the ones who actually fired at Kennedy, both agencies may now admit.

A.J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, authors of Coup d'Etat in America, published pictures of three apparent bums who were arrested at Dealy Plaza just after President Kennedy's murder, but who were strangely released without any record of the arrest having been made by the Dallas police. One of the tramps the authors identified as Hunt. Another was Frank Sturgis, a long time agent of Hunt's.

Hunt immediately sued for millions of dollars in damages, claiming he could prove that he had been in Washington D.C. that day-on duty at CIA. It turned out, however, that this was not true. So, he said that he had been on leave and doing household errands, including a shopping trip to a grocery store in Chinatown.

Weberman and Canfield investigated the new alibi and found that the grocery store where Hunt claimed to be shopping never existed. At this point, Hunt offered to drop his suit for a token payment of one dollar. But the authors were determined to vindicate themselves, and they continued to attack Hunt's alibi, ultimately completely shattering it.

Now, the CIA moved to finger Hunt and tie him to the JFK assassination. HSCA unexpectedly received an internal CIA memorandum a few weeks ago that the agency just happened to stumble across in its old files. It was dated 1966 and said in essence: Some day we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963 - the day President Kennedy was killed. Hunt is going to be hard put to explain this memo, and other things, before the TV cameras at the HSCA hearings.

Hunt's reputation as a strident fanatical anti-communist will count against him. So will his long and close relationship with the anti-Castro Cubans, as well as his penchant for clandestine dirty tricks and his various capers while one of Nixon's plumbers. E. Howard Hunt will be implicated in the conspiracy and he will not dare to speak out - the CIA will see to that. In addition to Hunt and Sturgis, another former CIA agent marked for exposure is Gerry Patrick Hemming, a hulk of a man-six feet eight inches tall and weighing 260 pounds. Like Sturgis, Hemming once worked for Castro as a CIA double agent, then later surfaced with the anti-Castro Cubans in various attempts to rid Cuba of the communist dictator. But there are two things in Hemming's past that the CIA, manipulation HSCA, will be able to use to tie him to the JFK assassination.

First, Castro's former mistress, Marita Lorenz (now an anti-Castroite herself), has identified Hemming, along with Oswald and others as being part of the secret squad assigned to kill President Kennedy. And secondly, Hemming was Oswald's Marine sergeant when he was stationed at CIA's U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan - where Oswald supposedly was recruited as a spy by the Soviets, or was being trained to be a double agent by the CIA.

In any event, Hemming's Cuban career and his connection with Oswald make the Lorenz story difficult for him to deny, particularly since the squad allegedly also included Hunt and Sturgis.

Who else will be identified as having been part of the conspiracy and/or coverup remains to be seen. But a disturbing pattern is already beginning to emerge. All the villains have been previously disgraced in one way or another. They all have "right wing" reputations. Or they will have after the hearings.

[Wim Dankbaar]

[B. A. Copeland]

Dallas Action Episode with Lorenz' daughter:

#163~November 22, 2019: "ACTION FIGURE: A Conversation With Monica Perez Jimenez, Daughter Of Assassination Witness Marita Lorenz."