Jim Garrison and the CIA's games with the ARRB and Warren Commission

     I would be just about the last person to give any credit to the claim and prosecution by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that the CIA was behind President Kennedy's murder.  But he may have had a point about the CIA's presence in New Orleans when Lee Harvey Oswald lived there.

     This comes from the CIA's apparently playing games with the Warren Commission in not telling it that the CIA had a sizable presence in New Orleans.  The CIA played games with the Assassination Records Review Board by redacting information from a document that a lawyer in Washington gave the House Assassinations Committee. The JFK Act did not give the CIA authority to make such a redaction. The fact that a redaction was made suggests the information was true. 

      The redacted information was that CIA had 50 employees in its New Orleans office in what was then called the "Masonic Temple" building, only blocks from where Oswald handed our pro-Cuba leaflets and got into a fight with anti-Castro groups. This doesn't suggest a CIA connection with Oswald, but the CIA was playing games with the Warren Commission.  It may have had more employees in New Orleans than the FBI did and, therefore, had a greater ability to investigate Oswald's fight with the anti-Castro Cubans than the FBI did. In the very least, it was incumbent on the CIA in 1964 to tell the Warren Commission of its capabilities in New Orleans, yet there is absolutely no evidence it did.

      All this comes from a memorandum written by Washington lawyer and assassination buff, Bernard Fensterwald, of a 1975 conversation he had with George Gaudet, who claimed to have worked for the CIA.  Most of the claims seem exaggerated or unfounded.  In fact, it could be said that all of those claims are unfounded, except that some agency, presumably the CIA,  redacted two of them when the document was first released. These two facts, in the third and fourth paragraphs on the second page of the memorandum, were that the CIA had 50 employees in New Orleans and that its offices were in the Masonic Temple building.  We know this because these redactions were removed in the Archives' 2023 release of the same document.

     The Masonic Temple building was at 333 St. Charles Street.  Oswald handed out literature in August 1963 on Canal Street a few blocks away.  He was arrested there after getting into a fight with anti-Castro Cubans.

     The bottom line is that the CIA played games with two government agencies. First, it hid from the Warren Commission the fact that Oswald's confrontation with anti-Castro Cubans happened only a few blocks away from its New Orleans office with 50 employees. Had the commission known, it might have asked if any of the employees witnessed the fight or Oswald's actions. It also might have asked the CIA to investigate. Second, the CIA played games with the ARRB by redacting information from a document that it didn't originate.  Nothing in the JFK Act permitted that.