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Death and Discovery

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nobody undertakes an investigation of this type without the aid of many kind people. I have had the fortune of becoming friends with many I have contacted. Such aid and invaluable friendship is indispensable, and I am thankful for both.

My debt to many people will be clear in this book. In any case, I would like to express my gratitude to other people who are not named in the text.

In France I received great support from old and new friends, such as Alban and Janine Woets, Herve and Sylviane Woets, Glenn Myrent and Liza Nesselson, Yves Goustard, Jinette Denale, Bernard Grave, Phillipe Madelin, Jacques Derogy, Jean-Marie Pontaut, Claude Piquant, Eugène Saccomano, Remy Kauffer, Erwan Jourand, Marcel Couvreur, Dominique Couvreur, Jean Serres and Marie-Anne Gobin.

Central Television of England was generous in its support, especially John Creasey, Nigel Turner and Sue Winter.

I also want to give thanks for the years of friendship and aid to my dear friend June Garnier.

My work in Belgium was made easier thanks to Jean-Pierre Wauters, Thiers Thonon, René Haquem, Roger Rosart and Geert Vandevalle.

Among the many people who helped me in the United States are Robert Borosage, Scott Armstrong, Bob Brauer, Gaeton Fonzi, Henry Hurt, Seth Kantor, Jeff Kruse, Jerry Meldon, Cari Myrent, John Marks, Mary McHale, Cari Oglesby, Jay Peterzell and Joan Schubert.

I must make a special thanks to my investigator in Washington D.C., Glyn Wright, for his work and his support.

The members of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) were extremely kind to help me throughout the last year. I want to thank Robert Feldcamp, Bill Deak, Jacques Kiere, Paul Boulard, Tony Greco, Kevin Gallagher and Ivette, who took hundreds of calls from me.

From the beginning, a series of people believed in my work, and I am in debt to them. Christine Bocek was with me from the beginning, like my agent, Bobbe Siegel and her husband, Richard Siegel. Georges and Boris Hoffman fought to make this book a reality. Joel Gottler provided me with invaluable advice.

Special mention should be made to those friends who offered moral support to me, which meant everything at difficult times. Pat Martin, Pete and Liz Dougherty, Patrice Hutchison, Ed and Eileen Brophy, Dave Kenig, Chris Wilkinson, Marta Dobriansky, Erica Goebel, Thompson Bradley, Stan Gorsky, Frank Callahan, Chirine El Khadem, Dominic Garvey, John Polito, Jean-François and Susan Couvreur and Ed Mahan.

I am very thankful for those who participated in the preparation of the manuscript, especially my editor, Nina Sutton, and my French translator, Edith Ochs. Jim Lesar and Mark Allen helped to correct many errors. Jacques Dubuisson, Annick Denoyelle and Nicolas Clarisse generously offered their time to me to help me to correct the text. Didier Lame provided valuable technical assistance to me.

Other friends whose support I must indicate are Gay Hennessy, Roger Kay, Susan Emory, Nellie Gonzales, Shilenen Blain, Michelle Chichester, Coppelia Padgett, Tom Quan, Doug Brignole, Mountain Mark, Lorraine Koski and Walter and Valeria Dobriansky.

I must also thank my brother, Rich Rivele and his family, for putting up with my strange behavior.

PROLOGUE

July 1988. Prisión de La Santé. Paris.

The discussion, which had been going on for four years, exploded in the dark prison of Paris, between the block of cells and the guardroom. Taken by surprise, the guards remained silent while the prisoner, his gray beard falling to his waist, took hold of my arm.

"You cannot do this", he pleaded. "It represents a tremendous danger."

"It is already done!", I yelled back in French.

"Then," he went on, "remove my name from it."

I lost control.

"But what about all I have done for you!", I shouted, the words resonating throughout the circular tower. "I have sent you money, I have visited you, I have testified in your favor, yet you have always refused to give the information me that I wanted.

He shook his head violently.

"The day I am released you will have everything that I have promised to you... you know it."

It was the same argument that he had always used.

"Perhaps you will not be released. Perhaps there is no information. I want the information now."

"You know that I cannot do this. They would kill me."

He appeared truly pathetic. Although he was only fifty-seven he looked to be eighty. This was his sixteenth year in prison and he was still awaiting judgment on his murder, twenty-two years before, of a Paris policeman.

"My book is written," I continued, "and has been sent to the publisher."

"Have you left out the names of the assassins?", he asked.

I freed myself of his grip.

"I have left nothing out. I have written everything."

He took hold of my arm again, this time with more force.

"By the love of God, let me read the book before it leaves", he murmured.

My rage calmed down.

"I have dedicated four years of my life to this project", I replied calmly. "I am going to reveal this history and neither you nor anybody else is going to censor me."

"If you name these people, they will kill you."

"If they have not killed me already, they never will."

"At least let me read what you have written about me", he requested.

"I made a deal with you", I responded. "My manuscript in exchange for yours."

He loosened his grip.

"I have always told you: once they release me you will have everything, names, dates, places, everything."

"It's already much too late for this", I said. "I want it all now."

He shook his head again, causing his beard to shake.

"They will acquit me on the first of October. Will there still be time to change the details?"

"Only if you can demonstrate to me that I am mistaken."

He shot a long and deep glance towards me.

"Very well...will you testify in my favor?"

"You know you have my promise", I responded to him.

He nodded.

"Then, until the hearing."

I released my hand.

"Until the hearing."

While I contemplated the frail figure of that man, long ago elegant and powerful, he returned laboriously to his cell. I thought suddenly about the length of the trip that had brought to me to this place.

This was not a prisoner who deserved too much mercy. Christian David was a presumed assassin, an old espionage agent and a convicted drug dealer. But, after four years following his tracks through the depths of international crime, after discovering shameful secrets of my country's history, and after destroying my family during the process, I understood that I no longer needed him. For the first time since I began to deal with Christian David I felt peaceful.

The information I had fought so hard for was the names of the three men who had shot the President of the United States in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on the 22nd of November, 1963.

The murder of John F. Kennedy is, I believe, the most important unsolved crime of the twentieth century. Twenty-five years later, the implications continue to affect the many millions of people who still remember where they were at the precise moment when they heard the news.

Four years ago, the waves of that crime reached me by accident. Without understanding well what I was undertaking, I became caught in an investigation on the death of a president which would take me across the world and would have the deepest implications for me, for my family and my understanding of the history of my mother country.

In 1979, a Congress committee of the United States reached the conclusion that the death of President Kennedy was "more than likely" the result of a conspiracy, directed by the heads of organized crime in North America. In spite of it, the North American Government has, to date, not made a single effort to try to discover those who committed the murder. The reason is clear to me; the government could not accept such a state of affairs. A citizen should be told the truth with respect to the history of their country. If my Government won't attempt to clarify the situation, then it is my responsibility, as a citizen, to find the truth.

This book describes the long, complex and sometimes dangerous trip that follows such determination. Only the names of two people have been changed, only with the intention of protecting them.

I do not offer any theory but evidence: the results of my investigation, including the testimonies of witnesses and the names of those who have been identified to me as the assassins; how and by whom they were contracted; how they assassinated the president and why. It is evidence which demands the attention, I believe, of the American government.

This book is the history of an investigation, of an investigation in search of the precious truth, in the middle of many years of lies. It is an investigation impelled by this belief: a country that allows living with a lie about its history is condemned.

Los Angeles, September 1988

I. A CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH HISTORY, 1984

I had gone to the local supermarket to buy some provisions and I stopped, as always, in front of the book counter. There, amongst the other books was the Warren Commission Report1 on the murder of President Kennedy. I had never read it and, since it only cost $1.98, I put it in my cart, between the diapers and the Kleenex. A simple gesture, but, as I would learn, the simplest gestures are, sometimes, the deepest.

It was the summer of 1984. Until then, I did not have a theory on the murder of Kennedy. I was 13 years of age in November of 1963, and soon I would have to experience a much more laborious loss, the death of my mother eight months later. Although I remembered the pain North Americans had shared after the death of the president, I had never had a special interest in the case.

I spent the nights of the long and warm summer that year absorbed in the official version of the death of the president, sometimes with my son sleeping over my chest. After two years of savings and a loan, my wife and I had bought a house in the outskirts of Los Angeles. She was a librarian at the Central Public Library, and I was an independent writer of film scripts and a journalistic investigator. While my woman went away to work, I remained at home to run the domestic duties, to write and to take care of our son. I enjoyed those hours dedicated to working and to watching our baby, who at that time was four months old. My own childhood had been very unstable. The experiences of the war had turned my father into an alcoholic, and my mother was a chronic patient. I did not know until many years after her death that she had become an addict to sedatives during one of her many stays in the hospital. This eventually caused her death at the age of 39.

I was determined that my son grew up with stability and never lacked love. I was 35 years old and I was happy: I had a family, a house and a reasonably prosperous career.

My first novel was a historical work on the civil war which had taken two years to write. It had won a prize already, although it was not yet published. However, I became immersed in national history and, while reading the report, I became more and more worried.

The Warren Report was, quite simply, a diversion.

The report was well written. Nevertheless, the more I advanced through the history of that day in Dallas, the more doubtful I became. Evidently, the conclusions were based more on the idea of the culpability of Lee Harvey Oswald than on the facts.

Once in a while, I would read a paragraph to my wife and ask her if she found it as unconvincing as I did. Sometimes I felt perplexed, other times frustrated and sometimes even angered. Obvious questions were not asked, the declarations of witnesses had not been listened to and the contradictions had not been clarified.

Two points especially concerned me. Not one of the best gunners of the nation had been able to equal his alleged ability2. The little evidence of Oswald's skill indicated that, at best, he was a mediocre gunner who had not practiced for many months before the murder3. That he had been able to shoot at a moving target, in the space of six seconds, with such fatal effectiveness, was simply incredible.

Secondly, it was obvious, by his behavior after the murder, that Oswald had not had any planned route of escape. As the Warren Commission suggestion, he could have wished to be captured so that his name would go down in history. If this had been the case, Oswald would surely have confessed to the murder. Instead, he resolutely denied killing the president, even when he lay dying in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters4. Madness, of course, had provided another explanation, but nobody, not even the Warren Commission, had indicated that Oswald was crazy. On the contrary, all the evidence on his mental state indicated that he was an intelligent person, despite his little education.

It was evident that the official version of the murder of the president was incomplete, imperfect and deeply unsatisfactory as a historical document. Convinced that I had not been accurately told what happened that day in Dallas, I began to read some of the literature related to the case.

In August, a magazine sent me to Austin to write an article on the wife of Lyndon B. Johnson and her National Wildflower Research Center. Since I had to fly to Texas, I decided to make the short trip from Austin to Dallas to see Dealey Plaza personally. I would also try to speak with some of the investigators of the assassination who lived in the area.

My reading had left me with the impression that Oswald had been used; manipulated by forces that he did not understand. His behavior during the last year of his life suggested he did not have control over his own destiny, although he seemed to believe he did.

My second objective was simple. Supposing that Oswald had not acted alone, I wished to speak anyone who had first hand knowledge of the murder. This, from the beginning, was my objective: to meet anyone who had been involved in the event.

I flew into Dallas and registered in a hotel in the Oak Cliff area, near the house where Oswald had lived. I wanted to walk the same streets Oswald had walked.

Ladybird Johnson was amiable during the interview conducted in the LBJ Library. After our conversation, I asked if I could use the telephone, and called Marina Oswald Porter. Her name and number had been given to me by Mary Ferrell, an investigator and resident of Dallas, mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of Anthony Summers' book Conspiracy5, one of the most intriguing studies I had read on the case. This was to be my first interview on the murder, and I was nervous.

The voice on the telephone had a slight Russian accent. I introduced myself and explained to her that I was investigating for a book on Oswald.

"This is exactly what we need!", she exclaimed. "Another book!"

I clumsily looked for a way to keep her on the line. I asked if I could invite her to dinner while I was in Dallas, since I wanted to speak with her about Lee.

"I never got to know who he was, really", she said. "Remember that we were married for only two years, and that most of the time I did not see him."

This comment reminded me of an observation Oswald had made to his mother after returning from Russia: "Not even Marina knows why I have returned to the United States."

After leaving the LBJ Library, I headed directly for Dealey Plaza. My first impression was one of surprise by how small the place was. It seemed to me the perfect site for an ambush, surrounded as it was by three sides: buildings, offices and the open end finished off by a bridge near the railroad. Once trapped in the center, a victim could not escape.

On the 22nd of November in 1963, the President's automobile had approached from the northeast corner of the street. The car's speed was reduced when turning from Houston Street towards Elm Street. From the buildings to both sides of the street, as with the elevated bridge and the well-known grassy knoll, the hidden gunners had been able to coordinate their fire with good cover and considerable opportunity to escape.

I climbed up the grassy knoll, where most of the witnesses and critics of the Warren Commission believed was the fatal gunner. It must have been a very daring man to shoot from there, I reflected, with a parking lot behind his back and a view of the fence from the control tower of the railroad.

Nevertheless, going by the evidence I had read, it seemed certain that this was where a killer had been. The mud in which some witnesses had seen dozens of tracks of footsteps after the murder had since been replaced by asphalt, but some of the original stakes were still in place. From this point, around thirty meters from the automobile, a professional sniper could not have failed.

I crossed the street in the direction of the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald had been working. The first level contained offices of municipal employees. I introduced myself to the receptionist as an independent writer who had been commissioned to write a history of the Sixties. I asked if it were possible to see the sixth floor, from where Oswald had shot President Kennedy.

The young receptionist gave me a routine answer: the upper floors were not accessible to the public. I insisted that I had to take some photographs for my magazine. She glanced at me doubtfully, before directing me towards an older woman. Both ended up admitting that they had never seen the famous floor and now had an excuse to visit it. The elevator did not work, so the three of us went by the stairs.

The sixth floor was open and deserted; the book boxes among which Oswald had worked had disappeared.

I walked towards the window at the Southeastern corner and, for several minutes, I remained in the place from which it assumed that Oswald had shot. I had brought along a camera with a 200 mm lens, more or less equivalent to the lens mounted in Oswald's rifle. Through the open window, I took several photographs of passing cars.

It was not a bad place for a gunner, but it was, indeed, not the best one. There was the problem of the oak that grew to the right. If I had been the gunner, I would have located myself behind the window of the southwestern end or, better still, in the Dal-Tex building, on the other side of Houston Street.

I showed the two women the place where it was assumed Oswald had hidden his rifle, between some cardboard boxes in the back part, and soon we followed the escape route by the wooden stairs, located on the side, opposite one of the elevators.

While we descended hastily, each one of our steps resonating in the hollow stairs, it seemed impossible to me that Oswald could have arrived at the second floor without being detected. In the best of cases, anyone running down these stairs would have been left breathless. In reality, Oswald had been found calmly drinking a Coca-Cola less than two minutes after the shooting. The simplest gestures are sometimes the deepest: to use a vending machine less than two minutes after the public execution of the President of the United States suggests Oswald did not know the murder was going to happen, nor did he know if his involvement in it.

I thanked my two companions and left.

That night I visited Mary Ferrell in her house in the north of Dallas, which had been transformed into a museum and library of the murder. A woman of about sixty, she was warm and energetic, and welcomed me in as if I had been an old friend.

Mary undertook my education on the case with an incredible fervor. She bombarded me with information, books, photos and copies of secret documents. In the course of the ten hour meeting, she provided me with information on the assassination which would have, regularly, taken months to acquire.

While she guided me through the findings of her twenty years of investigation, Mary Ferrell highlighted her words with exclamations, shouting and frequent arm gestures. I felt squashed by her knowledge and enthusiasm for the case. Her archives on Oswald covered virtually every day of the last year of his life; in some cases, hour to hour.

I left Mary's house at dawn, in a state of information poisoning. I had been loaded with much more material than I could absorb, but I had been left with a range of forceful impressions. The most significant of these confirmed my instinct of Oswald: he had been manipulated by powerful forces that he did not understand. I still did not know what these forces were, but I did know that this case was much more complex than I had imagined.

From my explorations in the Oak Cliff area, something was clear: Oswald had been the type of person who was accustomed with poverty, improvisation and the deception. His was a truly sad and shady life. After two years of defection from the United States, which I considered suspicious, he had returned with a Russian wife and a daughter to the badly paved streets of the south of Dallas.

On the following day, I walked from my hotel to a number of places where Oswald had lived. I finally arrived finally at Beckley Street, where he had spent the last weeks of his life under the false name of O.H. Lee.

The day was gray and humid; a storm seemed to be on the way. When approaching the house, I saw an old couple seated on the porch. I asked them if this was 1026 North Beckley. Both of them frowned back at me.

"I suppose you are looking for Lee", the woman said.

I told them I was from California and was writing a book on Oswald.

"You and everybody", she replied.
"Would I be able to look in his room?", I asked.
"If you pay, you can", the other answered.

I was prepared to pay a small amount for the privilege, but when they said one hundred dollars, I thanked them but rejected. I then asked them which room had been his. She indicated a room on the right side of the house. The room was just big enough to fit a bed. In his last days, Oswald had been reduced to almost nothing.

The sky darkened and the wind increased. Soon I began to run, while an intense rain fell and the thunderclaps resonated over the city. I arrived back at my hotel soaked.

The decision to kill Kennedy, as declared by the Warren Commission, was made by Oswald the night before the murder, after a discussion with his wife. The Commission placed great importance on the fact that on the morning of the assassination, Oswald placed a package in one of the book stacks, although the evidence clearly demonstrated that this package could not have contained a rifle6. However, a rifle was found in one of the book stacks.

The Commission readily assumed that Oswald had been the lone assassin, even though no eyewitnesses saw him on the sixth floor7. More than half of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza that day heard gunfire coming from the front of the President's automobile; however, this was readily forgotten by the Commission8. The doctors who attended to the dead President declared that he had been struck from ahead; this evidence was also erased9.

Within the hour following the murder it has been assumed that Oswald killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, less than a kilometer from where Oswald lived. However, the evidence greatly suggests that he could not have arrived by the moment at which Tippit was murdered. According to eyewitness accounts of the killer, Oswald was not there. Furthermore, ballistic evidence taken from the revolver alleged to have killed Tippit showed that it had not been the murder weapon10.

All of these points could have been used to clarify the judgment of Oswald, but such judgment would never be used. Two days after the death of the President, Oswald was killed in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. The assassin was a nightclub owner called Jack Ruby, a man known to the police who had ties with organized crime going back to his childhood. His testimony before the Warren Commission only served to make the mystery deeper. Although he repeatedly requested that he be transferred to Washington to testify, insisting that his life was in danger in Dallas, the Commission remained firm in its decision of not granting such a request. Jack Ruby would die of cancer four years later, apparently without having revealed his story to anybody11.

Lee Oswald was assassinated shortly before turning twenty-four. In spite of his youth, he had a long and complex history. It has been said he converted to Marxism as a boy, during a brief stay in New York12. However, he joined the Marine Corps at seventeen, which hardly seemed the most logical action for a confessed Communist.

As a young marine, he served in a secret U-2 base in Japan, a center of activity for the CIA. This was a time when U-2 flights were used to carry jealously guarded secrets13. Oswald, who worked in worked in a radar capacity, had access to highly secret technical information14. However, he had the lowest of security authorizations15.

During the same period, he was associated with suspects of communist activities in the area16. He also studied Russian and subscribed to Soviet publications, without his superiors raising an eyebrow at these activities.

After several months, Oswald asked for a premature discharge, due to family reasons. He claimed it was necessary so he could support his frail mother; however, all evidence indicates that she was in good health17. In spite of this, he obtained the license quickly and, less than one week later, was on his way to Moscow.

The narration of the Commission Warren on this crucial period in the life of Lee Oswald was simply incredible. It was evident that he had not had sufficient money to travel to the Soviet Union. The time factor of this trip was also a source of problems. The details on his passport were in conflict with the supposed details of his trip and it did not seem possible that he could arrive at Moscow on the date the Warren Commission attributed to him18.

After arriving in Moscow, Oswald went directly to the United States Embassy of to turn in his passport and announce that he was trying to obtain Soviet citizenship. He also said he planned to give the Soviets information he had learned as a marine. He then disappeared for six weeks19. In spite of this, the Commission assures that the KGB never met with or interrogated Oswald20.

For approximately two years, Oswald disappeared within the Soviet state, only occasionally appearing. Several western tourists found him during their trips, some taking snapshots of him which ended up in the CIA archives21.He worked in a factory in Minsk, enjoyed a large wage and married Marina Prusa-kova, niece of a colonel of the secret police22.

The last and most surprising chapter of the Russian odyssey of Oswald concerns his efforts to return to the United States. Although the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had personally written a memorandum warning that an imposter could be using Oswald's birth certificate, the State Department had, incomprehensibly, ignored the fact that Oswald was a risk to national security23. And, when the future killer of the President demanded his right to return to North America with his wife and daughter, the State Department even paid for his return trip.

Once again in the United States, Oswald continued being treated as a special case. In agreement with the Commission, none of the intelligence services of the United States spoke with him regarding his defection and stay of two years in Russia, at a time when all tourists who returned from the Soviet Union were routinely interrogated.

The last seventeen months of Lee Oswald's life were full of inconsistencies. He began working in a photographic company; his supervisor was a graduate of the Institute of Languages of Defense, and a veteran of the Army Security Agency who spoke perfect Russian. In spite of being a defector, and being dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps, Oswald was working in a laboratory which worked on secret maps and aerial photographs for the military.

Among his few friends during this period was a man who had important connections with espionage services from many nations, including a CIA contact, to whom he gave information regarding his trips through the Third World. He had, for example, been on a hike in Central America which had taken him through the Bay of Pigs area, shortly before the invasion of the same region24.