Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (44 page)

It this isn't complicated enough, QJ/WIN even had a tenuous connection
with Jack Ruby-in the person of Thomas Eli Davis III.

Tom Howard, Ruby's first attorney, asked his client if there were any
persons the prosecution might produce who could be damaging to Ruby's
defense of momentary insanity. Ruby unhesitantly came up with the name
"Davis." Ruby said Davis had first approached him about using some of
Ruby's strippers in pornographic movies, but that later the two had become involved in gun-running activities.

The FBI told the Warren Commission they could not locate such a
person. However the CIA did-and still does-have a classified file on
Thomas Eli Davis III.

Veteran newsman Seth Kantor details Ruby's connection to Davis in his
book Who Was Jack Ruby? Born to a respectable Texas rancher couple on
August 27, 1936, Davis was discharged from the Army in 1958 and
attended the University of Michigan until he was asked to leave because of
low grades.

In June 1958, Davis entered a Detroit bank and handed a teller a note
that threatened her life if she didn't give him money. According to the
teller, Davis then said, "I can't do it. I can't do it" then threw his
thousand-dollar take on the floor. He fled from the bank only to be caught
by police a block away. Due to his family's good reputation and his lack
of a criminal record, Davis was given a five-year probated prison sentence.

While on probation, Davis obtained passport No. D236764, issued by
the State Department on January 31, 1963, in New Orleans, a feat almost
impossible for a convicted felon without highly placed and powerful help.

Davis's ensuing activities took him into the murky world of anti-Castro
gun-running, and it was here Davis met Ruby. Ruby told his attorney that
Davis had come to one of his nightclubs and that he had intended to go
into the gun-running business with Davis on a regular basis. However,
apparently Davis's activities were not limited to dealing with Cuban gun
runners.

At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Davis was in North Africa, allegedly setting up a deal to supply arms to the OAS. Less than a month
later, he was jailed in Tangiers in connection with the assassination.

His wife told authorities that her husband was a soldier of fortune who
had operated in such diverse countries as Indonesia, Algeria, and Cuba,
and in the months prior to his arrest they had traveled through London,
Paris, and Madrid.

According to correspondence between J. Edgar Hoover and the State
Department, Moroccan security police detained Davis "because of a letter
in his handwriting which referred in passing to Oswald and the Kennedy
assassination. "

Kantor wrote that evidence showed Davis was freed from jail through
the efforts of QJ/WIN, "the code name given by the CIA to an unsavory
foreign agent with a network of Mafia contacts." Here could be the
connection, not only between Davis and the CIA, but between Davis and
Mertz (if indeed Mertz was QJ/WIN).

Through early 1963, Davis had contact with the anti-Castro Cubans, as
confirmed by his wife and family. And he not only was in New Orleans
during the same time as Oswald in the summer of 1963, but once admitted
to reporter George Carter that he had used the name Oswald while in North
Africa.

Based on similar statures, ages, and features, many researchers today
believe that Davis may have posed as Oswald in the months leading up to
the assassination.

Neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on
Assassinations chose to investigate the Davis story. Whatever information
Davis had was carried to his grave.

Former Wise County, Texas, Sheriff Eldon Moyers said that in September 1973 Davis was attempting to steal copper wire from a construction
site when he cut into a 7,000-volt power line and was electrocuted.

Through his connection to QJ/WIN, Davis certainly was in the right
circles to be involved in assassination attempts.

According to testimony given to the Senate Intelligence Committee,
QJ/WIN's boss on the ZR/RIFLE team was the CIA's William Harvey.
Harvey's specialty was anti-Castro activities in general and the attempts to
assassinate Castro in particular. Harvey, of course, was in contact with
Johnny Roselli and Florida Mafia chief Santos Trafficante.

A reporter from Dallas once queried the FBI about Jean Soutre and his
presence in Dallas in 1963 and was told that man was not Soutre, but
another Frenchman named Michel Roux, whose name just happened to
coincide with one of Soutre's aliases.

However the Bureau, who could find nothing concerning Soutre/Mertz/
Roux in 1964, could not offer any subtantiating documents to support their
story about the Soutre namesake.

At the heart of this labyrinth of intelligence and mob intrigue is QJ/
WIN, who appears to have been Michael Victor Mertz.

Soutre today has been located, working as the public-relations director
fora French casino. He denied any inside knowledge of the assassination.

Soutre did suggest that Mertz, an old enemy, may have been in Dallas
using his name.

Virgil Bailey, an inspector for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has told Texas researchers he remembered being ordered to pick up a
Frenchman in Dallas at the time of the assassination. Bailey complied but
today cannot recall the man's name. However, Bailey described the
Frenchman to researcher Gary Shaw as a man about forty-five years old
with thin, graying hair.

In 1963, Soutre was about thirty-five years old and Roux was about
twenty-five. Mertz, the agent connected to both intelligence and worldwide organized crime, was about forty-five years old.

The answers to questions raised by the French connection to the Kennedy assassination lie in locked files in Washington. But some assassination researchers feel the other gunman in Dealey Plaza just might have
been the Frenchman known to the FBI as Michel Roux, to the French
authorities as Jean Soutre, to the CIA as QJ/WIN and to the international
crime syndicate as Michael Victor Mertz.

Further evidence of the French connection to the assassination came in
1988 when Los Angeles author Steve J. Rivele claimed that after several
years of investigative work he had learned the names of three French
gangsters who killed Kennedy. He cited one source for his information as
the imprisoned Christian David. Rivele said David claimed to have been
offered a contract to kill JFK by the chief of the Marseilles Mafia, Meme
Guerini.

The three hitmen were Sauveur Pironti, who today still lives in Marseilles; Lucien Sarti, who was killed in Mexico in 1972; and a man named
Bocognoni, who is believed to be living in Central or South America.

According to Rivele's sources, Sarti wore a police uniform and fired
from behind the wooden picket fence on the Grassy Knoll. Pironti and
Bocognoni reportedly fired on Kennedy from a nearby building-either the
old Dal-Tex Building or perhaps the Dallas County Records Building.

Pironti, questioned by European newsmen after Rivele's book The
Murderers of John F. Kennedy was published in France in 1988, denied
any involvement. His denial was supported by French military authorities
who said Pironti was serving at a sea post at the time of the assassination.
However, later investigation failed to substantiate this alibi.

According to Rivele, David and another mobster, Michel Nicoli, claimed
that Lee Harvey Oswald played no part in the assassination. Allegedly the
three assassins-Pironti, Sarti, and Bocognoni-were hired to kill Kennedy by the French Union Corse-the European branch of the international crime syndicate-on orders from organized-crime figures in America.
The trio of hitmen flew to Mexico where they were met at the Texas
border by some Chicago mobsters who drove them to Dallas. After the assassination, the trio remained in a "safe house" for more than a week
and then were flown out of the country.

Interestingly enough, when Rivele approached U.S. government officials with David's story, he was put in touch with Lucien Conein-the
same man who was working with QJ/WIN, the shadowy CIA "asset."
Conein, known in Vietnam as "Black Luigi," often bragged about his
connections with the Union Corse. Conein claimed he was made an
honorary member of this branch of the Sicilian Mafia after serving with
Corsican partisans as an officer in the OSS and the French Foreign Legion.

It was Conein who, at the urging of Nixon aide Charles Colson,
implicated President Kennedy in the assassination of Vietnam's Diem,
telling newsmen that Kennedy knew in advance of the plot to overthrow
Diem.

Asked to comment on the French connection to Kennedy's death, James
H. Lesar, vice president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center
in Washington, D.C., said: "I think that it's sufficiently serious that the
Department of Justice and the U.S. Secret Service should investigate it
further. "

Today it appears that no such investigation has been forthcoming, the
U.S. media has paid little attention to Christian David's admissions, and
Rivele reportedly has gone into hiding after receiving death threats.

There is some evidence-the suspicious activities of the Agency in
Mexico City; Morrow's purchaser of Mannlicher-Carcano rifles, and the
ZR/RIFLE program, which may have included the French criminal Christian David, for example-that suggests a foreknowledge of the assassination within the CIA.

Even Kennedy's successor once voiced suspicion of the spy agency.
According to the Washington Post, Marvin Watson of President Johnson's
White House staff in 1967 confided to an FBI official who wrote that:
"[Johnson] was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the
assassination. Watson stated the President felt that CIA had something to
do with this plot."

Naturally, the CIA long has maintained innocence in the assassination
and the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that, while
the Agency was "deficient in its collection and sharing of information
both prior to and subsequent to the assassination," the CIA was not
involved.

Many researchers today are not as certain as the House Committee.
However most agree that the CIA-as a government agency-most probably did not plan or authorize Kennedy's death.

There is little question that by the time of the Bay of Pigs Invasion the
Central Intelligence Agency was running out of control. It had gone far
afield from the intelligence-gathering and coordinating agency envisioned
when created in 1947 by President Truman.

Documented CIA abuses included the overthrow of governments, secret
mind-control experiments on unsuspecting victims, and assassination plotsall wrapped in a blanket of "national security" secrecy with any information given out strictly on an individual "need-to-know" basis.

As evidenced by the Yuri Nosenko affair and the on-again, off-again
anti-Castro MONGOOSE program, there appear to have been serious
divisions within the CIA in the early 1960s. While some factions undoubtedly supported President Kennedy and his programs, others did not disguise their hatred of him.

The CIA had become highly compartmentalized. Often CIA employees
working on one project would have no idea that people they came into
contact with also were working for the Agency. And the Agency-for
expediency-employed and used some very unsavory characters-such as
David Ferrie.

There can be little doubt that many persons in contact with Oswald also
were in contact with the CIA. These contacts, plus the abundant evidence
that Oswald was involved in intelligence work, raise serious questions
about who may have been maneuvering Oswald in the fall of 1963.

However, it seems highly unlikely that the CIA, as an organization,
initiated the assassination of Kennedy.

What does seem possible is that persons within the CIA may have
played roles in an assassination conspiracy that later compelled their
superiors to cover up their activities for fear that their connection to the
Agency might become public.

The possibility also exists that all of the Agency intrigues involving
Oswald, Ferrie, and the Cuban exiles were only so much window dressing
to draw attention away from the real assassins-French "hitmen" hired
by the American mob with money and promises of protection from highly
placed sources within the U.S. government.

They [the FBI] have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.

-Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell

Anyone making a serious study of the JFK assassination must take a
long hard look at the FBI and the Secret Service. The former-as we now
know-monopolized the investigation of the tragedy while the latter failed
to prevent it.

The contacts between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the FBI
are many and troubling. No less than seven FBI agents were associated
with Oswald during the year and a half between his return from Russia and
the assassination.