The Garrison Papers

New Orleans DA Jim Garrison

I am late to the party here.  Former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s files were scanned and released as one massive zip file of 180 PDF files uploaded in 2016.  There is a lot to go through here for both researchers and people with an interest in JFK assassination research.  This is truly a deep dive so set your time accordingly.  

The zip file is 1.9 gigs and the unzipped basically the same size.  

https://archive.org/details/GarrisonPapers/Additional%20Thornley%20material/

And I also highly recommend Kennedy and King’s “Creating the Oswald Legend: Appendix” by Vasilios Vazakas.  It’s a long and detailed look at the cast of characters involved in JFK assassination research.  

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/creating-the-oswald-legend-appendix

Also posted on my Substack.  https://open.substack.com/pub/georgebailey/p/the-garrison-papers
 

Some James Garrison Reading

James Garrison

I know full well that Jim Garrison is considered by many in the research community to be the Patron Saint of conspiracy research.  But dig a little deeper and one will see that he was as flawed as the rest of us.  Some of his investigation was spot on and sincere and some of it was utterly unethical. 

Long-time researcher Jones Harris worked with Garrison for a bit in the Clay Shaw investigation.  He told me right up from that in his view, Jim Garrison was a “charming charlatan.”  I was surprised to hear this at the time as I had never heard or read of anybody that worked with Garrison utter some an evaluation.  The main incident that Harris remembered was asking Garrison if Carlos Marcello was in the Mob and he was told that Marcello was no longer in organized crime and was now a New Orleans businessman.  Obviously this is not true, since Marcello was a career mob boss in New Orleans. 

Below is a link to a 1992 New Yorker article by Edward J. Epstein about Jim Garrison and some of the shenanigans he pulled in the case he prosecuted against Clay Shaw.  Recommended reading before you start to feel inclined to see a halo around Garrison’s head.

Link

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/garrison.htm

Book Review: Destiny Betrayed - JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case

Vincent Bugliosi in his End Notes for his book, Reclaiming History, calls Jim DiEugenio “a sincere conspiracy theorist.”  When reading DiEugenio’s second edition of his book, Destiny Betrayed, one is struck with just how little theory is involved.  It’s all a solid mix of history, fact, and proper historical context for the events that are to follow.  Jim DiEugenio said in a recent interview on Black Op Radio that he didn’t want to caught up in the minutia of details regarding the assassination in this new volume, but instead wanted to pursue an examination of how and why it happened and how it got covered up.  And that is what readers  will experience as they read this book.  

Destiny Betrayed begins in the Cold War shadow wars, a mix of skullduggery and dirty deeds where even the President is kept in the dark in regards to what is going on.  As DiEugenio shows, CIA Director Allen Dulles was attempting to dupe Kennedy into foreign policy and military actions he was not wanting to be a part of.  Dulles took the Central Intelligence Agency far from its original intent of intelligence gathering to a machiavellian, duplicitous outfit overthrowing democratically elected governments under the guise of combating communism, replacing them with controllable right-wing dictatorships, and for the most part, setting the stage for the profiteering of American corporations.  So manipulating Presidents for CIA objectives has become the modus operandi of the Agency that lasts to this day.  Meanwhile, the American public sleeps through these affairs being distracted with the communistic threat, the baby boom, pop culture, sports and so on.  The National Security State descends and much of American history becomes a secret locked away in warehouses.

As DiEugenio’s documents in the first part of his book, the leaders of the National Security State knew early on they had a problem with John Kennedy.  He wasn’t for war mongering, turning down attempts to pump troops into Vietnam and launch preemptive nuclear strikes.  Kennedy was not a believer in the Domino Theory.  The Bay of Pigs fiasco, well detailed in Destiny Betrayed, is a CIA run military op destined to fail so American troops could be called in it finish the job. Kennedy found out none of this till he ordered an inquiry into what happened and  the ever duplicitous Allen Dulles and other top CIA officials lost their jobs. 

The Pioneers Get All The Arrows

The star of the book is Jim Garrison.  His coming around from true believer in the Warren Report to a believer in conspiracy and pursuing a trial against an alleged conspirator is an compelling story.  He was flawed man, but a brave man who paid a terrible price for seeking the truth with his future career in politics destroyed.  The full weight of the federal government fell on his head like a ton of bricks.  His reputation was pillared by a hostile press, some of whom were government informants, who were to attack and expose his every move in the national media.  Kennedy bagman Walt Sheridan (former ONI, FBI, and NSA) was sent down to harass witnesses and later put together a slanderous, over the top attack on Garrison on NBC (which was so bad they had to let Garrison have an on-air rebuttal). And the attacks on his character raged from 1967 to this very day. (For example, Gerald Posner in his 1993 book named Garrison a child molester and Vince Bugliosi in his 2007 book labeled him, “symptomatically psychotic.”)  After the trial of Clay Shaw was over, and lost, Garrison was indicted twice and acquitted.  As you can see, charging headlong into the Status Quo is not for the faint of heart.

As Jim DiEugenio points out, in actuality, Jim Garrison’s attempt to prove conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination was flawed before it started.  Even his staff advised against it after lead witness David Ferrie died.  But Big Jim decided to press on. It didn’t help his cause much by trusting people that he should have left alone.  Men such as Bernardo Detorres, William Gurvich, and Gordon Novel. These men were not rubes–they were all experienced operatives and functioned as spies embedded within his investigative operatus, funneling information to Garrison’s chief tormentor, Walter Sheridan, and journalist/government shills such as Hugh Aynesworth and James Phelan.  DiEugenio documents in great detail how the FBI and CIA were formally engaged to see this Louisiana state trial of Clay Shaw fail.  

And this of course raises the biggest question of them all–if the Warren Report is correct and Lee Oswald is the only assassin, and there is no conspiracy, then why does the government, along with allies in the press, have to take these extreme measures to make sure a conspiracy verdict is not reached in a state trial?  The Justice Department sent down their lawyers to coach witnesses in how to answer questions at taxpayer expense, bug the District Attorney’s phones and transcribe everything said, plague his operation with informants, and have the DOJ successfully killed off subpoenas to top officials. It was a Federal government takedown from top to bottom.  If Garrison is wrong then why not let him fall on his own sword if their account of the President’s death is true?  What would they have to fear?

Plenty apparently.  It appears they overplayed their hand.

The Shaw Trial

Destiny Betrayed does a good job in describing the intricacies of the trial, the legal wrangling, and what Garrison could of done in hindsight.  Important witnesses either died or faded away; other witnesses were assaulted or intimidated into changing their stories by the Sheridan Machine.  Lots of witnesses were never called such as the 16 people Garrison had in regards to Clay Shaw’s Bertrand alias (something that he was never allowed to prove in court). 

While too intricate to go into here, there were some highlights.  One important incident was when autopsy physician Dr. Pierre Fink admitted that he, and the other two other physicians present at the Kennedy’s autopsy, were under control of another military authority, whose name he couldn’t remember.  Another was a screening of the Zapruder film that Garrison had to wrestle from Time-Life.  A film up to that point few had seen, and it was a shock for all witnesses present in the courtroom.  Too bad it took till 1975 before the general public got to see it on Geraldo Rivera’s TV show.  

The End

Jim DiEugenio paints a vibrant world of 1960's New Orleans, a place of clandestine activity, informants, intelligence operatives, down and outers, sexual adventurers, conspirators, Cubans, hookers, misfits, and suspicious entanglements.  It's quite a contrast to the worlds envisioned by the Warren Report defenders where everything suspicious is an illusion, where every contrary witness is wrong, and everything is conveniently explained.  Their selective harvesting of the details strips the soul out of how fascinating all of this is and how a conspiracy to murder a President could really take shape.  

Destiny Betrayed is fascinating work, well paced, expertly organized, and properly sourced.  New document releases from the ARRB and other sources bolster the narrative and explain who is telling the truth and who is not.  It’s the definitive book on Jim Garrison and how tantalizingly close he came to blowing the case wide open.

Available now in bookstores and online at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and in ebook format for the Kindle and iPad. 

Details

ISBN-13: 9781620870563

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Publication date: 11/15/2012

Edition description: Second Edition

Edition number: 2

Pages: 496

Patterns, It’s All About Patterns

When Fox’s Fringe TV show first aired one of the plot themes involved looking for patterns. Since the first season they have seemed to have passed on that motif and moved on to other conspiracies involving alternate dimension themes. As with the Kennedy assassination, and for that matter other conspiracies, there are patterns flowing through them all. I’m currently reading American Conspiracies by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell (author of excellent JFK book, The Man Who Knew Too Much). While Jesse deals with a smattering of his favorite conspiracies from JFK to Jonestown to 9-11, probably the most interesting thing to me are not the behind the scenes plots which he writes about but the patterns that can seen emerging in them.

It follows as thus: An attack, an assassination, or disaster like Waco happens. After the shock and outrage the government swoops in to investigate via a committee of political insiders often labeled as “Statesmen.” Actually, they are just a bunch of lawyers. From somewhere high up in the Establishment, the fix is already in. The Commission puts on a play called Investigation Theater and issues a report. The report will not differ from anything that was originally said 24 hours after the event occurred. Later, a well placed person in the mainstream press will issue a glowing article gushing over how well the Commission did its investigation. In the end there is no justice, the loose ends are never tied up, and the people are left in the dark. Any critics are dismissed as kooks and generally mocked by the very same shills in the press. Sometimes they end up with an untimely and suspicious demise.

You can see this pattern in every conspiracy that has ever gone down over the centuries. It really is amazing how little changes from the inception of the event, to the end results of the formal investigation. From the massacre of the MacDonald clan in Glencoe Scotland in 1692 to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 the first explanation remains the same. Just ask a member of the 9-11 Commission about one of the controversies in the case and he will give the same response a member of the Warren Commission would give: “We stand by our report.” Gerald R. Ford gave the same response over the years as did many other Warren Commission members. The basic heart of man never changes, especially the heart that conspires. It amounts to an endless cycle of history.

Most likely, the government has a connection to the event, hence the repeating of history which creates the pattern.

Another pattern over time is you find out the connections between the players. A lot more information is available in books and online for the average person sifting through the JFK assassination than the original investigators had. One thing you find out is a lot of the major players are not who they say they were. The political theater that is being played in the background is astonishing. Who knew, for example, that when Lee Oswald got into the altercation with the Cuban exiles on Canal street in the summer of 1963 that he was a player in cast of characters, all of whom were connected to government agencies? Of the three Cubans, two were FBI informants; the third had CIA connections. Oswald of course, as I have documented elsewhere here, did have linkage to the CIA and the FBI. Even the TV station photographer filming the incident was an FBI informant as well. Later, when Oswald is invited to a live radio debate with three others, they are all connected in one way or the other to the FBI and the CIA as well. Every team is represented and they all have players in action. What political theater this all represents! I long wonder how much more of this is still going on. Is everything we see going on around us like this? With secret goings on hidden from us? We’ll only know when the files are released, if ever.

So government agents seem to always be part of the pattern. They can often appear as average citizens, staff lawyers, or journalists. They all seem to fulfill the same role, to support whatever the government claims even if common sense dictates otherwise. It has been pointed out that most of the defenders of the Warren Report are in some way or other connected to the CIA. There is no evidence to support Arlen Specter being a government shill in the Warren Commission but he sure acts like it. I still don’t know who put him up to this or why he would care so in proving the government’s case. Maybe he felt it a part of the job. It should have been to find out the truth, but lawyers often do not settle for the truth--they settle for an answer that is politically acceptable to the powers that be, in other words, the Establishment. Specter starts out as a low level staff attorney and rises above the fray as a major player with his Magic Bullet tale. The lone bullet theory is now part of the lore and controversy of the case. One day, maybe a FOIA lawsuit will break something loose on him. All we can know is there are way too many lawyers involved and they are not truth seekers--their purpose is to take care of their clients--the government.

One alleged journalist that we know was allied with the government was Hugh Aynesworth. Starting out with the Dallas Morning News and later migrating over to Newsweek, he was instrumental in bedeviling Jim Garrison during the months of the Clay Shaw trial and grand jury investigation. Documents that have been released show him applying to the CIA although it is unclear if he was brought in as an agent. Never the less, he maintained strong contacts with them and the FBI and it is clear in his articles he had inside information into the inner workings of the Garrison investigation. Big Jim could not keep anything quiet with the huge amount of informants and spies infiltrating the investigation. This makes Aynesworth hardly an objective newsman but he was not the only one so tied in. Edward Epstein wrote a book mocking Garrison’s trial of Shaw called Counterplot. He later admitted to working closely with the CIA. In a well-known 1970’s article in Rolling Stone, Carl Bernstein reported that there were hundreds of journalists working with the CIA in order to further the federal government’s interests. No telling how many are there now.

It all about patterns. Keep an eye out. They are changing all the time.



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The Garrison Tapes by John Barbour

Jim Garrison in his own words. An excellent documentary with a full set of interviews of Garrison by John Barbour, creator of Real People. He did a great job of allowing Garrison to tell his side of the story uncensored or made to look like a fool as the mainstream press tried to do. Great stuff for the historical record and a must see for all with an interest in the JFK assassination. Ten segments await you at Above Top Secret.

Link HERE

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