| Subject: Clay Bertrand and the CIA |
Author:
Mike Ranuro
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Date Posted: 12:21:50 02/27/02 Wed
In reply to:
Mr Torres
's message, "Was there a relationship between Ferry, Banister, & Shaw?" on 11:06:21 02/06/02 Wed
Another source for "insider" CIA information is Victor Marchetti. After having worked for the agency, he defected and wrote a book critical of the agency. Two different accounts of internal agency discussions of the Clay Shaw case exist. The first is from the article "The Strange Death of Clay Shaw," in True, April, 1975, p. 79:
One of the difficulties in checking into Garrison's claims is that no high-level official of the CIA has been willing to talk openly about what really went on in the halls of the CIA secret complex at Langley, Virginia.
That was until Victor Marchetti, a 14-year veteran of the CIA, decided to call it quits. An expert on the Soviet military, Marchetti had been recruited to the agency by a CIA-connected college professor. He rose through the ranks to become executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA and finally made it to the agency's executive suite, sitting in on the CIA's most secret, highest-level staff meetings. But the more he learned, especially about the dirtier aspects of the CIA murder campaign in Vietnam, the more disenchanted he became. In late 1969 he resigned from the CIA.
When he decided to write about his experiences in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, his book became the first in U.S. history to be censored by the government before publication. The CIA felt that Marchetti knew too much, would compromise the agency, and arranged to have key passages deleted. Although he is under strict court restrictions as to what he can reveal about his tenure with the CIA, Marchetti did agree to discuss the Kennedy assassination with TRUE magazine.
Marchetti was attending high-level staff conferences in early 1969 when Clay Shaw was being brought to trial by Jim Garrison. At these conferences, he said, it was determined to "give help" in the trial.
"I sure as hell knew they didn't mean Garrison," Marchetti said.
Whenever they talked about the trial, they spoke "in half-sentences" he said, cutting off discussion before getting to the main point. "They'd say, 'We'll talk about it later,' meaning a private chat after the meeting," Marchetti recalled.
When Marchetti tried to find out what was going on, he was informed that Clay Shaw at one time had been a contact for the CIA. His job, Marchetti was told, was to monitor businessmen going behind the Iron Curtain — "you know," Marchetti said, "to try to find out if so-and-so was going to a denied-access area." The businessmen would then be debriefed by the CIA and questioned about what they had seen and done. Often this was very useful in gaining information about activity in Communist countries.
But Marchetti and the others were told that the CIA's connection with Shaw was to be top secret. The agency did not want "even a remote connection with Shaw" to leak out, Marchetti said.
Marchetti now states that Shaw's links with the CIA could have been much more extensive, and that he and the others could have been given a "cover story" to explain the agency's interest in the Clay Shaw trial. "They often lied to us," he said. "They use the term 'need to know.'"
Jim Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins (p. 234), quotes Marchetti also. Although Garrison cites an issue of True for his quotation, the passage apparently comes from a press release issued by Mark Lane, and not True.
I used to attend, among other things, the Director's morning meeting, his morning staff meeting. This was Richard Helms at the time and he held a meeting every morning at 9, which was attended by 12 or 14 of his leading Deputies plus 3 or 4 staffers — the executive assistants to the number one, two and three men in the Agency and also the Press Officer. I often used to take the minutes of this meeting . . . which are a joke because things would be left out or written in a vague fashion so they were meaningless. But during the Clay Shaw trial I remember the Director on several occasions asking questions like, you know, "Are we giving them all the help they need?" I didn't know who they or them were. I knew they didn't like Garrison because there were a lot of snotty remarks passed about him. They would talk in half sentences like "is everything going all right down there ... yeah . . . but talk with me about it after the meeting" or "we'll pick this up later in my office." So after several of these over a week or two I began to ask myself what's going on, what's the big concern. I began to ask around ... and one of the other people who attended the meeting ... at the time I said, "What's the concern about this trial and this guy Shaw?"
I was then told, "Well ... Shaw, a long time ago, had been a contact of the Agency ... He was in the export-import business ... he knew people coming and going from certain areas — the Domestic Contact Service — he used to deal with them ... and it's been cut off a long time ago" . . . and then I was told "well of course the Agency doesn't want this to come out now because Garrison will distort it, the public would misconstrue it."
It's astonishing that conspiracists use Marchetti as a source for Shaw being a spook, since what he explicitly says is that Shaw gave information to the domestic contact service.
Marchetti speculates that this was a "cover" and that Shaw was really a spook, but Marchetti's speculation is not evidence.
The cryptic comment "Are we giving them all the help they need?" is interpeted by the Garrison crowd as meaning that the CIA was aiding the Shaw defense, but it could just as easily have been a question about whether the New Orleans CIA office had "all the help they needed" to deal with the situation — which the CIA most certainly took seriously.
One very revealing comment is the claim that Garrison might "distort" Shaw's relationship to the CIA. What sort of relationship might Garrison distort? That Shaw was a deep cover spook? Garrison would not need to distort that!
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