In the same sentence, Carrozza also lists "Howard Hunt, and an unidentified anti-Castro youth who tape-recorded Lee Harvey Oswald during an interview when Oswald tried joining a New Orleans anti-Communist group as a hired gun."[ 23 ] (This claim is not supported; and according to the book's Index, Pawley's contact with the unidentified youth is not referred to again.)

This reference resurrects the unresolved allegation of Pawley's close friend and political ally Clare Boothe Luce, about a story from her "young friend," the skipper of one of the anti-Castro raider boats she and Pawley were sponsoring. Luce claimed that her friend (to whom she gave the pseudonym "Julio Fernandez"), told her the night of Kennedy's assassination that he "had these tape recordings of Oswald" in New Orleans, tapes which included Oswald's "bragging that he could shoot anyone, even the Secretary of the Navy."[ 24 ]

This story, never explained, supplies an alternative to the FBI and Warren Report account of Oswald's contact in early August 1963 with New Orleans DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier in his shop Casa Roca, a remarkable visit even before this new information.

It is important to note that both Philip Geraci and Vance Blalock, the two witnesses to Oswald's visit to Bringuier's shop, testified (in divergent and mutually exclusive versions) that, after Oswald left, they "started following him home."[ 25 ] In Luce's version as she told a journalist in 1975, "Fernandez"' contacts "followed him and found he was in a Fair Play for Cuba Communist cell."[ 26 ]

We seem to have two different accounts of the same event. The FBI and Warren Commission version, as we might expect, is what I have called a "phase two version," in which nothing conflicts with the picture they present of Oswald as a lone assassin.

Geraci and Blalock were interviewed by the Warren Commission but said nothing about having taped him (10 WH 76, 82). The Luce-Hernandez version, in contrast, is a "phase one" story, in which Oswald appears as a hired gun working ultimately for Castro: "The young Cuban who called me," Mrs. Luce continued, "said that there was a Cuban Communist assassination team working somewhere - in Dallas, New Orleans, or wherever . [ and ] Oswald was their hired gun."

Luce's Cuban added, somewhat paradoxically, that Oswald, before deciding to work for Castro, "had tried to report the Communist plans to the FBI some time before the assassination."[ 27 ] This switch from anti-Castro to pro-Castro roles for Oswald, unlikely as it may sound, closely mirrors the Warren Report's account of Oswald between August 5 and August 9, 1963. Bringuier himself told the Washington Post after the assassination that on August 5 "I thought he might be an agent for the FBI or the CIA," before Bringuier caught him on August 9 distributing leaflets from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[ 28 ]

(Today I shall skip what the taping of Oswald implies about the Lake Ponchartrain training camp that Oswald asked about, and go directly to what I say about the so-called Bayo-Pawley plot, the CIA-backed operation TILT that brought in Jerry Hemming and Frank Sturgis, the two men behind the Lake Ponchartrain training camp.)

Pawley, Sturgis, Hemming, Martino, and the Bayo-Pawley Plot

Pawley, Hemming, and Sturgis (along with John Martino) were actively involved with the CIA in a conspiratorial penetration of Cuba in April 1963, the so-called Bayo-Pawley plot (known to the CIA as Operation TILT).

The Bayo-Pawley story has been told many times. David Kaiser has seen in it the hand of Martino's associate John Roselli, and concludes that in the Bayo-Pawley plot "Roselli and Trafficante were using Martino and Pawley as cut-outs to enlist the help of the CIA."[ 29 ]

cont.