Still on the Case
Conspiracy Buffs live in a world of uncertainty, haunted by goat’s heads, a pristine bullet, and bouncing skulls. But the most haunting uncertainty of all is this: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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While the poets people the world of that November 22 with a grief-generated galaxy of hostile ghosts, the official investigators narrowed their focus to one man. Somehow lost in the controversy over the acoustical evidence is that the House Select Committee actually came up with a prime suspect. A candidate for the Man Behind It All. And testimony to back that up. It all comes down to what you think of the tail-and-the-dog story.
The tail-and-the-dog story is at the heart of the hottest area of assassination theory still thriving after all these years: Mob-hit theory. In the past few years, mob-hit theory has succeeded in shouldering aside such other rival contenders as CIA-anti-Castro-hit theory, pro-Castro-hit theory, and KGB-complicity theory and in pushing itself to the forefront of consideration.
The rush to the mob-hit judgment began in 1979 with the publication of the final report of the House Select Committee. Written by organized-crime expert and chief counsel Robert Blakey, the committee report comes within a whisker of calling the events of November 22, 1963, a gangland slaying and within a whisker of a whisker of pinning the contract on New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello.
“The committee found that Marcello had motive, means, and opportunity to have President John F. Kennedy assassinated, though it was unable to establish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity,” the report states. “The committee identified the presence of one critical evidentiary element that was lacking with other organized crime figures examined by the committee: credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to figures having a relationship, albeit tenuous, with Marcello’s crime family.”
The key here is Oswald’s uncle Dutz. Ruby’s organized-crime ties — to teamster thugs connected with Jimmy Hoffa, to Sam Giancana and guys like John Roselli who were in on the CIA-mob plots to assassinate Fidel Castro — had long been known. What the House Select Committee established was an Oswald organized-crime connection: his uncle Charles “Dutz” Murret, of New Orleans, whom the committee described as both “A surrogate father of sorts throughout much of Oswald’s life in New Orleans” and “An associate of significant organized crime figures affiliated with the Marcello organization.”
The abstract connections are all there. We know that Marcello hated the Kennedy brothers with a deep bitterness that grew out of much more than fear of the threat that Bobby Kennedy’s organized-crime prosecutions posed to his billion-dollar racketeering empire. Marcello had experience the kind of physical humiliation at the hands of Kennedy justice that can brew a passion for revenge surpassing mere calculation of profit and loss.
Just two months after John Kennedy’s inauguration, Marcello was virtually kidnapped in New Orleans by immigration officers acting at the direction of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. Arrested, handcuffed, he was dragged without a hearing to a Border Patrol plane and, according to Robert Blakey, “flown 1200 miles to Guatemala City and dumped there, without luggage.” When his presence became known to the authorities in Guatemala, he was expelled and “unceremoniously flown to an out-of-the-way village in the jungle of El Salvador, where [he and his lawyer] were left stranded. Salvadorian soldiers jailed and interrogated the two men for five days, then put them on a bus and took them twenty miles into the mountains . . . . They were hardly prepared for the mountain hike, as they were dressed in silk shantung suits and alligator shoes. . . . Marcello fainted three times. . . . During a downhill scramble, Marcello fell and broke tow ribs” before reaching an airstrip and managing to reenter the U.S. illegally.
Indubitably, in all its unaccustomed humiliation at the hands of the Kennedys, the motive is there.
But where is the direct connection? That’s where the tail-and-the-dog story comes in. The teller of the tale is Ed Becker, whom Blakey describes as “a former Las Vegas promoter who had lived on the fringe of the underworld.”
The scene is Churchill Farms, Marcello’s plantation outside New Orleans. It is September 1962. Becker is there to discuss a business proposition, but the talk turns to the Kennedy campaign again organized crime. The mention of Bobby Kennedy’s name drives Marcello into a rage. “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch,” he shouts, according to Becker. “He’s going to be taken care of.”
How? Becker testified before the House Select Committee that the plan was to “take care of “ Bobby by “taking care of” his brother and that Marcello “clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy murdered in some way.” Becker said that Marcello compared Bobby to the tail and his brother Jack to the whole dog, citing a proverb: If you cut off the tail, the dog will keep biting; but if you chop off the head, the dog will die, tail and all.
The committee took a lot of time painstakingly and convincingly corroborating the circumstantial details of the story. Then they called Marcello in to testify about it. He denied it. But he also testified before the committee in executive session that he made his living as a tomato salesman, testimony that his recent Brilab conviction calls into question.
The tail-and-the-dog story may not be enough evidence to indict or convict, although I have been told that the committee staff forwarded its Marcello material to the Justice Department in order to encourage it to do just that. But Becker’s story takes mob-hit theory a step beyond motive, means, and opportunity in the abstract.
That night. Back in my hotel room after Penn Jones’ tour, recovering from the plunge into undiluted grief. I continue calling my buff contacts across the country. A long midnight talk with Bay Area buff Robert Ranftel is the most provocative.
Ranftel is a codiscoverer of a fascinating new piece of information about the case. The Gillin story. The Psychedelic Oswald theory.
Don’t laugh. It’s based on careful research, and it addressed perhaps the most enduring and perplexing mystery remaining in the case: the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Because, after all these years the question for most researchers is no longer whether Oswald was involved but who he was. Was he KGB or CIA? Was he a pro-Castro partisan infiltrating anti-Castro groups, or was he an anti-Castro activist setting up false pro-Castro fronts? Was he informing for the FBI or being informed on? Did he support JFK or hate him? There is convincing evidence on both sides of each of these questions. How could one man have created so much ambiguity about his true identity in so short a time? And why? Was he just confused? Or was he out to confuse?
Ranftel unearthed a clue to this dilemma, an episode that took place during Oswald’s mysterious sojourn in New Orleans the summer before the assassination. The Gillin story first surfaced in a document that wasn’t declassified until 1977, and FBI memo about an interview with a New Orleans assistant district attorney name Edward Gillin. On the day Oswald was killed, Gillin phoned the FBI to report a strange encounter he had had the summer of 1963 with a man calling himself Lee Oswald. How this skinny guy named Oswald had come into his office and started talking about a book he’d read by Aldous Huxley. A book about psychedelic drugs. “He was looking for a drug that would open his vision, you know, mind expansion,” Gillin recalled. He had come to the assistant DA, Oswald said, because he wanted to know if such drugs were legal. And how to get them.
Oswald and Aldous Huxley. What a bizarre meeting of the minds. Oswald and psychedelic drugs. What a combination of ingredients. And yet Ranftel and his collaborators, Martin Lee and Jeff Cohen of the Assassination Information Bureau came up with several other periods in Oswald’s career during which the psychedelic connection might have been made.
The U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan, for instance. Where Oswald served as a Marine Corps radar operator before he defected to the Soviets. Ranftel and company discovered that during the time Oswald was stationed there, Atsugi base was a storage and testing facility for the drugs used in the CIA’s Operation Artichoke. Artichoke was the forerunner of Operation MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s search for a foolproof truth serum — at first called the Twilight Zone drug — which led to the testing of LSD, often on unsuspecting military personnel. Ranftel and his colleagues located a Marine who was stationed at Atsugi at the same time as Oswald and says that he himself was given LSD and other psychedelics.
And then there was Oswald’s curious bad-trip episode at Atsugi. Ranftel, Cohen, and Lee described it last March in their Rolling Stone article, “Did Oswald Drop Acid?”: “While Oswald was on guard duty, gunfire was heard. He was found sitting on the ground, more than a little dazed, babbling about seeing things in the bushes . . . what in the Sixties would become known as a bad trip.”
Ranftel and company point to the widespread suspicion that Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union may have been staged with the connivance and encouragement of the CIA or military intelligence, both of which were at the time repeatedly trying to plant “defector” operatives inside the USSR. The cite CIA sources revealing that agents dispatched into situations with the potential for hostile interrogation — including the use of psychedelic interrogation aids — were often exposed to such drugs before setting out on those missions, so they would be able to recognize and cope with the effects of the drugs. People so exposed were known in the intelligence world as enlightened operatives.
Oswald an enlightened operative? Oswald a Huxleyan psychedelic mystic? The implications are, indeed, as they used to say, mind-blowing.
For one thing, as Ranftel remarks tonight, “it might explain that strange, quizzical smile you see on the guy’s face in so many of his pictures.”
What was going on behind that smile? The Psychedelic Oswald hypothesis offers an explanation, a way of reconciling some of the intractable contradictions he left behind. CIA or KGB? Pro-Castro or anti-Castro? Perhaps the answer is neither and both. Perhaps the answer is that he enjoyed the game of posing as both, of playing at infiltrating one side on behalf of the other, of playing both sides against the other, the pleasures of the enlightened operative. We know that as a boy Oswald’s favorite TV show was I Led Three Lives. Had drugs given a psychedelic twist to the solemnity of that classic of role playing?
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