Dr. Mary’s Monkey Read online

  Later the vigilant Romney Stubbs sent me a newspaper article from New Orleans about this same Juan Valadez, now of New Orleans, which listed the 30 years he worked for the CIA among his many credentials. Did this Juan Valadez work at the International Trade Mart in New Orleans in 1963 and live in the apartment complex with Mary Sherman? If “yes,” it means that the man who called the police to report the fire in Mary Sherman’s apartment was a CIA agent. This is such an important issue that it deserves a better determination than I can provide here. No, I have not contacted the retired CIA officer to ask him about any contact he may have had with Lee Harvey Oswald or Mary Sherman. But I wish HSCA or ARRB had. Due to the importance of this question, it would be best to get the answer under oath. Doing so would minimize speculation about the similar sounding names and the possible role of the CIA.

  10 Keith, “A Matter of Motives.”

  11 Davis, Mafia Kingfish, p. 372.

  12 Posner, Gerald, Case Closed (New York, 1993), p. 496.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER 7

  The Cure for Communism

  BY THE FALL OF 1979, I found myself in the Graduate School of Tulane University, enrolled in its Latin American Studies Program. My “area of expertise” was Political Science. Our story picks up in a seminar called the “Urbanization of Latin America,” taught by William Bertrand, Ph.D., from the faculty of Tulane University’s School of Public Health.

  William “Billy” Bertrand was a great professor by any measure, probably the best I encountered in my years of college and graduate school. He possessed a brilliant analytical mind, a deep commitment, a positive sociable style, and a gift for presenting the most complex subjects in simple language. Professionally, he was an epidemic fighter, thoroughly schooled in the most advanced techniques of statistics, medicine, and sociology in order to battle deadly epidemics around the globe. This ex-Marine personally travelled from continent to continent witnessing the ravages of disease, be they in Africa or Ecuador. A typical summer assignment for Bertrand would be six weeks in remote regions of Zaire trying to sort out the path of transmission of some mind-boggling illness. He occasionally suffered terrible infections from these Third World trips, all of which he seemed to take in stride. In my opinion, there’s not a medical school or university in the world that would not benefit from having a professional of his caliber and character on their staff.

  Bertrand came from the simple, common-folk background of south Louisiana. His name “ Bertrand” is a Cajun name, like Boudreaux or Bordelon. (He was not related to the infamous Clay Bertrand from the Warren Commission volumes.) Like his black hair, black eyes, and rounded features, it was proof that he was really from the core of French Acadian settlers of southern Louisiana. Bertrand used to say that he could walk from New Orleans to Houston, staying at a different relative’s house every night, and that he unplugged his telephone for two weeks before Mardi Gras to keep his myriad of country cousins from calling him for a place to stay. These anecdotes were typical of his warm, personable style. He was very popular with the students.

  The urbanization seminar was held in Tulane’s main library, directly across the street from the law school. The seminar room itself was on a second or third floor in a window-less room toward the center of the building. It was a graduate-level course, with about eight graduate students and one or two undergraduates. About half of the students in this particular seminar were from Latin America. There were lots of affluent and well-connected Latins at Tulane. I personally knew students from Cuba (exiles), Costa Rica, Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Belize, and Panama. I remember one of the Latins in Bertrand’s seminar particularly clearly. I will call him Freckles, because his face was covered with them. He seemed younger than I, say early twenties at the time, medium height, slender build, quiet, and with a hard edge about him. He was always vague about his national origin, but he was very clear about his politics: He was an avid anti-Communist. Freckles was the only person in class who routinely let his personal political views get in the way of his academic work. Bertrand stopped him on more than one occasion, saying, “That sounds like a personal political opinion.” Admittedly, it’s hard to discuss the urbanization of Latin America or the dynamics of development in the Third World without discussing politics, but efforts were generally made in academic circles to stay as objective as possible.

  One day Bertrand was leading the seminar’s discussion on educational challenges in the Third World. He made the point that one of the problems that both socialistic and capitalistic governments faced when trying to educate their population was that education (investment in people) was ultimately “capital intensive,” meaning that the investment (school buildings, books, teachers, etc.) must be paid before the benefit of the education (skilled labor, social services, etc.) can be reaped.

  The point that socialists needed capital in order to achieve their objectives sparked a lot of discussion. It defied the black-and-white rhetoric which characterized much of Latin American political debate. As the discussion progressed, Cuba was mentioned repeatedly, since it was the only functioning socialist government in Latin America. And Cuba was a touchy subject.

  To many Latins, Castro was an anti-gringo politician, and in their eyes that made him a Latin hero, which they liked. But to others, he was a thief, a murderer, and a criminal. The latter group were generally Cubans, since many of them had seen their family fortunes ruined and, in some cases, their families killed at the hands of Castro’s revolutionaries.

  TULANE is a very well-respected school throughout Latin America, and is probably better known and better respected there than in the U.S. This is not accidental. Tulane has a long history in that region. This reputation is based upon a number of factors, e.g.:

  • Its location gave it valuable economic interests and contacts. New Orleans is both the mouth of the Mississippi River (the largest commercial waterway in the United States) and the northern port of the Caribbean. Until recently, it was the commercial gateway to Latin America. Lumber, sugar, coffee, and bananas flowed into the U.S. through New Orleans, while machinery, money, and medical services flowed back.

  Academically, however, the problem with discussing Cuba as a model of social development had always been more of a function of superpower relationships than one of ideology. Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union was seen by the United States as posing a military threat to the entire Western Hemisphere, and when combined with Cuba’s confiscation of American assets after the revolution, it triggered the most tenacious economic boycott in American history. This embargo crippled the Cuban economy. Add to that years of U.S.-sponsored covert warfare waged against Cuba (from blowing up Cuban oil refineries to infecting Cuban livestock with viruses), and it is amazing Castro’s government survived at all.

  • Tulane was respected academically. For over 100 years Tulane Medical School has specialized in fighting the diseases which plague the tropics. This ripe history is studded with major scientific accomplishments. For example, it was Tulane that helped to prove malaria was spread by mosquitoes, at a time when that defied mainstream scientific thinking. This discovery had an enormous positive impact on public health in Latin America. Consequently, Tulane was widely recognized as a top academic institution among educated Latins.

  • It was politically correct for the Latin American elite to send their children to Tulane to be educated. Tulane had exquisite “anti-Communist” credentials. This was primarily due to the relationship between Tulane University and the United Fruit Company. Samuel Zemurray, president of the incredibly powerful United Fruit Company during the 1950s, was a New Orleans native, and became Chairman of Tulane University’s Board of Directors. As Chairman, Zemurray stacked the Tulane Board with United Fruit officers.

  In any event, the discussion in the seminar turned to “It’s really too bad about Castro.” Not only had his relationship with the Soviet Union allied him with a totalitarian Communist state and presented him as a military t
hreat to the United States, but it also tainted his socialism. It was difficult to judge whether socialism was right or wrong for Latin America on the basis of Soviet missiles. It would be much simpler if Castro was not around — or so the discussion went. Then the inevitable discussion of how to assassinate Castro started. No one even suggested that the U.S. had not been trying, despite the fact that assassinating a foreign head of state was explicitly illegal. After all, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had already disclosed numerous CIA attempts to assassinate Castro. The conversation covered the predictable escalating path from shoot him, to bomb him, to poison him, to the more exotic methods like blowing up his cigar. It ended with the classic exasperation, “They ought to be able to come up with something to get rid of him!”

  After he died, Zemurray’s ornate mansion on St. Charles Avenue became the residence of the president of Tulane University. United Fruit was actually a Boston-based company which had controlled the Central American fruit business with an iron hand for nearly a century, and was at the center of the Cold War conflict in Central America. To illustrate its influence, consider Guatemala. When the democratically elected government of Guatemala purchased 250,000 acres of undeveloped land from United Fruit in 1954, the American government responded with a CIA-organized coup d’etat which ousted President Arbenz.1 Allen Dulles (who later became CIA Director), his brother John Foster Dulles (the U.S. Secretary of State) and Sam Zemurray were all major stockholders in United Fruit.2

  At this point, Freckles, who was sitting directly to Bertrand’s right, turned to him and said in a confidential tone, “El Padrino is working on a virus.” Bertrand’s surprise was both immediate and obvious. He was half-appalled and half-confused. Freckles had used this Spanish word for godfather in a manner that assumed Bertrand knew whom he was talking about, even if the rest of us didn’t. But Bertrand did not recognize the name and paused to unravel the comment. Then he said, in an incredulous voice, “Who?”

  • Tulane was well promoted in the region, especially by Dr. Alton Ochsner, who was Chief of Surgery of Tulane Medical School. Ochsner travelled Latin America from Mexico to Argentina giving lectures. The implied message: If you are too sick for your local doctors, come to New Orleans, and we’ll take care of you.

  Freckles continued, “ El Padrino. You know, Ochsner. He’s working on a virus to get Castro.”

  Bertrand was stunned and went straight into deep thought to calculate the comment. Ochsner was a very powerful man in Tulane circles. A single unthoughtful comment about Tulane’s wealthiest and most powerful medical figure could ruin a career. And what if this student’s comment was accurate? We could see the mood on Bertrand’s face change, as the idea of unleashing a designer virus on the Caribbean took hold in the mind of someone who had witnessed horrible epidemics firsthand. We all waited for him to speak. Then in a voice more serious than any I had ever heard him use, he said to Freckles, “If I were you, I’d be very careful who I said that to.”

  Freckles nodded in response to Bertrand’s comment, but did not speak. Dr. Bertrand had given him good advice without questioning his honesty or his source.

  Bertrand shifted our attention back to urban migration patterns in Latin America, the decline in breast feeding, the thin-ice of the Latin American middle class, the economic interests of multi-national corporations, and what, if anything, anyone could or should do about any of these things.

  To this day, I wonder what mixture of fact, fantasy, and/or proximity lay behind Freckle’s comment. At the time, I had seen no hard evidence which supports the claim that Dr. Alton Ochsner was involved in a medical project attempting to kill Fidel Castro.3 Freckles’ comment was, however, an indication of Latin perceptions of Ochsner’s politics and evidence that a rumor did exist in certain Latin circles that Ochsner was (or had been) involved in a medical project which was trying to kill Castro. But was this rumor really a cover story to conceal something else?

  Was there a deeper secret buried beneath the secret war against Cuba?

  NOT LONG AFTER THE FRECKLES INCIDENT, I left Tulane University in search of a career in communications. In March 1980, I began working at Fitzgerald Advertising, Inc. in New Orleans.

  Fitzgerald’s offices were on historic St. Charles Avenue between the New Orleans Central Business District and the Garden District. From my sixth-floor window I could see the statue of Robert E. Lee standing on his lonely column, high above Lee Circle. The statue faced north, it was said, because Robert E. Lee would never turn his back on the South. Below, the antique green streetcars clamored down the grass median of St. Charles Avenue, clanking and hissing their way through the perpetual humidity and circling beneath his feet. A few blocks down St. Charles Avenue I could see the leafy green trees of Lafayette Square, a lush urban park flanked by large Greek Revival buildings.

  On the northeast corner of Lafayette Square stood the new Hale Boggs Federal Building, towering over an urban street-mall bordered by Camp and Lafayette Streets. This had been the site of the old Newman Building. On the sidewalk in front of the Boggs Building was a bronze plaque removed from the walls of the Newman Building. The plaque commemorated the military and financial support given by the people of New Orleans to the people of Cuba who were struggling for their freedom in the 1800s. But the plaque did not mention the military and financial support given to anti-Castro Cubans from the same building in the 1960s.

  In 1963, the Newman building held the offices of “private detective” Guy Banister, former head of the FBI’s Chicago office4 and later Deputy Chief of the New Orleans Police Department. Banister was a staunch segregationist and founded the ultra-right-wing Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. He claimed to have the largest file system of “‘anti-Communist intelligence” in the South, which he shared routinely with the New Orleans FBI office.5 With help from his employee David Ferrie, he ran a paramilitary training camp near New Orleans to prepare Cuban exiles for covert assaults inside Cuba on Castro’s government.6

  In the blocks surrounding Lafayette Square were the local offices of the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service. Across the square from Banister sat Chairman Hebert of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, whose job it was to prepare the U.S. military’s budget for Congress’ approval and to hide the CIA’s budget from both Soviet and American scrutiny.7 One block away was the Reily Coffee Company where Lee Harvey Oswald worked. The address stamped on the famous “Hands Off Cuba” flyers that Oswald handed out that hot August day in 1963 was 544 Camp Street: the Newman Building. Banister’s wife found similar flyers in her husband’s office after his death. Garrison concluded that Oswald was involved with both Banister and Ferrie during the summer of 1963, and that Banister was Oswald’s “handler” who arranged events,8 such as the trip to the mental hospital, to make Oswald later appear to be a convincing political assassin.9

  In the early 1980s Fitzgerald was the largest advertising agency in Louisiana, with impressive credentials. Among its long list of well-respected clients was the Reily Coffee Company. Fitzgerald was conservative and “old school” by all definitions of the term. Like many ad agencies, Fitzgerald was occasionally asked by clients or influential citizens to work on pet projects, and they tried to oblige when they could.

  ONE DAY, IN THE SUMMER OF 1982, one of my bosses called me to his office shortly before lunch. As I entered, he asked if I knew so-and-so. The name was not familiar to me. He laughed a little and muttered: “You’re one of the lucky ones.” I joined him in a polite laugh, as he made light of his comment. Then he began his solicitation in earnest, explaining that he had received an inquiry from “a friend of the agency” that we had to respond to. He wanted me to check it out. He said that it was “right up my alley,” and wanted me to go see whether the agency should get involved.

  He handed me a small yellow slip of paper torn from an office pad with an address, but no name, written on it in pencil. He instructed me to be there at 1:45 that afternoon. “They” would explai
n what they wanted. He then sent me on my way, reminding me to be “on time” for the meeting. These were very “busy people.” All I could tell by his tone was that he considered this to be an important courtesy call, but that he was not seriously interested in the project. Given that the advertising business depends upon clear and precise instructions, the ones he gave me that day were remarkably vague. I grabbed a quick bite to eat and caught the next streetcar to Canal Street, wondering all the time where I was going.

  Canal Street was bleached white hot by the midday sun. A sweaty crowd pushed down the sidewalk into the front door of the street car. Loiterers monopolized the scarce shade. I unfolded my yellow piece of paper to get my bearings. Comparing the address to the nearest storefront, I realized my destination was across the street (on the edge of the French Quarter) and in the next block. Quickly calculating the approximate location, I headed for the ornate Maison Blanche building.

  Entering the brass and marble lobby of the Maison Blanche building, I savored the cool blast of air-conditioning and immediately inspected the tenant roster to figure out the identity of my mysterious destination. After a minute I realized there was no such suite. I was in the wrong building. So I went back on the street and carefully compared the numbers from my yellow paper with the numbers above the doorways. My destination was next door.