Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [179]
More than three years before the assassination, when Oswald was an obscure defector living in the Soviet Union, a memo about him had gone forth under Edgar’s name. ‘There is a possibility,’ it warned the State Department on June 3, 1960, ‘that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate.’
According to a former Army Intelligence colonel, Philip Corso, high-level U.S. officials said within weeks of the assassination that they knew two Oswald birth certificates, and two Oswald passports, had been in circulation before the assassination – and had been used by two different men. Corso cited two sources – Passport Office head Frances Knight and William Sullivan, then head of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Corso said it was in large measure his briefing on this matter that led Senator Richard Russell, one of the members of the Warren Commission, to doubt the lone-assassin theory.
There is some evidence that a few months after Edgar wrote his 1960 ‘imposter’ memo, someone was masquerading as Oswald. In January 1961, an American and a Cuban exile negotiated to buy ten Ford pickup trucks from a dealer in New Orleans. The dealer remembered the incident after the assassination, dug out the old sale form and found that his memory was not playing tricks. One of the truck purchasers had identified himself as Oswald, representing an organization called Friends of Democratic Cuba. The dealer’s form was withheld by the FBI until 1979, yet the lead had great potential significance.
Friends of Democratic Cuba was an anti-Castro group, and the attempt to buy trucks occurred during the buildup to the Bay of Pigs invasion. FBI agents were out asking about Lee Oswald’s business dealings within two weeks, and Passport Office concern about a possible imposter followed soon after. It seems that while the real, pro-Communist Oswald was far away in the Soviet Union, someone of the opposite political persuasion may have been using his name in the United States.
The coincidences proliferate. Gerard Tujague, a senior member of the same anti-Castro group, had once employed the real Oswald as a messenger. And a leading member of the group, in 1961, was Guy Banister, a man of mystery not least because of his close relations with the FBI.
Guy Banister served with the Bureau for twenty years, seventeen of them as a Special Agent in Charge, and he was one of the handful of veterans who had worked alongside the Director in the field, during the recapture of escaped convicts in 1942. His Bureau career had ended in 1955, following major surgery and a warning to his wife that ‘as a result of brain damage, he would develop increasingly unpredictable, erratic conduct.’
The Banister who returned to Louisiana, the state of his birth, was a man disintegrating. His state of mind shifted from feisty to choleric to violent rage. Alcohol made the problem worse, and the pills prescribed by his doctors brought little relief.
None of this deterred Banister from his self-appointed role as superpatriot and crusader against Communism. He was a member of the John Birch Society and the paramilitary Minutemen, an investigator for Louisiana’s Committee on Un-American Activities and publisher of a racist tract called the Louisiana Intelligence Digest. He believed plans for racial integration were part of a Communist plot against the United States, and he worked feverishly in support of the CIA-backed campaign to topple Fidel Castro. On a journey to Europe he reportedly met with French terrorists plotting the assassination of President de Gaulle.
Like many former Bureau agents, Banister was a private detective, and he kept up his contacts with the Bureau at the highest level. ‘Guy was in touch with J. Edgar Hoover long after he left,’ said New Orleans Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn, and the New Orleans office of the FBI was close by Banister’s detective agency.