This is Dr. Mary Sherman. Please remember her face because she tried to save your children’s lives by blowing a critically important whistle. She was brutally murdered for trying to warn you all. And the men she warned were destroyed as well.
Book excerpt from Mary Ferrie and the Monkey Virus: The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory.
Chapter 3: The Classroom
“In one of my classes there was a student named Nicky. His father was Dr. Nicolas Chetta, the Coronor of Orleans Parish who was involved with Garrison’s investigation. Dr. Chetta was somewhat of a local celebrity for us. Not only was he an elected politician whose name was frequently in the press, but he was the team physician for our football team. Once he even took our class to on a memorable field trip to the city morgue….
Nicky erupted and said in a loud, tense voice that Garrison had gotten a “raw deal.”….
Then Nicky started talking. He held the class spellbound for fifteen minutes with information about the investigation, much of which had either not been revealed to the press or which they had basically ignored. We all listened carefully. His points included:
– that someone, presumably the FBI or the CIA, had bugged Garisson’s office and conference rooms and had stolen and/or photocopied his files concerning Clay Shaw and had turned them over to Shaw’s attorneys.
– that ALL of Garisson’s extradition requests for witnesses from other states had been turned down, as had all of his requests to subpoena former federal officials, preventing him from assembling the pieces of his puzzle in a court of law.
– that an ex-pilot named David Ferrie and a former high-ranking official named Guy Banister had been training anti-Castro Cubans for paramilitary assaults against Cuba at a secret training camp across Lake Pontchartrain, and
– that Ferrie and Banister had stolen weapons for this operation from a company in Houma, Louisiana which was operating as a CIA front. Nicky said he couldn’t pronounce the name of the company, but said that the name “looked German, but sounded French.” (He was referring to the Schlumberger Tool Company, pronounced Slum-ber-jay.”)
Someone asked Nicky why we had not heard all this in the press. It was a fair question. We had been taught that the press was the “Watchdog of Government.” How could they have overlooked these obvious and important points. Nicky paused and said Garisson’s favorite saying was “Treason never prospers, for if it prospers, none dare call it treason….
Ferrie was an unusual man in many respects. Professionally, he was a pilot. Politically, he was a notorious right wing extremist. Personally, he was completely bald from head-to-toe and was a homosexual who favored teenage boys… Ferrie died several days after Garrison’s investigation was made public. Garrison, who was about to arrest Ferrie for conspiring to murder President Kennedy, thought that either Ferrie had been murdered to silence him or that Ferrie had silenced himself. But it was the Coroner’s job, not the District Attorney’s, to rule on the cause of death. Dr. Chetta, Nicky’s father, was the Coroner and said he found no evidence of foul play. Therefore, he ruled that Ferrie died of natural causes (a ruptured blood vessel in the brain) and noted that Ferrie had been under enormous stress.
Nicky continued: Ferrie had known Lee Harvey Oswald when he was a cadet at the Civil Air Patrol and had been with him that summer…
Nicky said the day they announced Ferrie’s death, Bobby Kennedy called his father to discuss the cause of death with his father. A murmur shot through the room. Nicky countered by saying that he had answered the phone himself. Thinking it was a prank, he hung up on the Senator, But Kennedy called back. This time Nicky’s father answered the phone himself.
Then Nicky started talking about Ferrie’s apartment which his father had seen the day Ferrie died. Ferrie lived alone. But in his closets they had found both women’s clothing and priest’s robes. They also found a small laboratory with a dozen mice in cages which he used for medical experiments. His medical equipment included microscopes, syringes, surgical tools, and a medical library. When he talked to Ferrie’s other landlords, they were told of a full scale laboratory in his apartment with thousands of mice in cages. He was inducing cancer! Ferrie claimed he was looking for a cure for cancer, but Garrison’s investigators thought he was trying to figure out a way to use cancer as an assassination weapon, presumably against Castro and his followers.
A student asked, “How could they induce cancer?”….
MONKEY VIRUSES! The room groaned. I rolled my eyes and dropped my forehead into my hand. Why did it have to be monkey viruses? Garrison was already misunderstood because his plot was stranger than jazz – too complex, too subtle, and too bizarre for the American TV audience. Why couldn’t it have been something simpler, like injecting rats with radiation. Cancer from plutonium? The public might follow that, but cancer from monkey viruses! The rest of the country would never buy it. The very words conjured up a dark college of alienating images – diseases imported from tropical jungles in the bellies of insects mixed with monkey heads boiled in voodoo rituals on the edge of the Louisiana swamp at midnight. It was all “so New Orleans.”
You could feel that everyone in the room wanted to believe Nicky, but it was hard to know what to say. Then somebody said, “I don’t get it. How could a monkey virus cause cancer?” Nicky said he didn’t understand that part either. My brain was about to burst, but I wasn’t about to bring Tulane into the conversation. Then another student blurted out that there was a “kid” down at Tulane Medical School who was dying from the total collapse of his immune system. They couldn’t figure out what was causing it. They gave him every antibiotic they had and nothing worked. He would get better for a while, and then he would get worse. While this comment was interesting, it sounded “off the wall.” Two thoughts raced through my head. First, what did the uncontrollable collapse of an immune system have to do with our discussion about monkey viruses? And secondly, I said to myself: I’m obviously not the only student at Jesuit that has a family member working at Tulane Medical School. I was certain that this was “insider” information. It was the first time I had ever heard it (But not the last!)…..
“But Mom,” I said in an exasperated and serious tone, “weren’t they researching monkey viruses down at Tulane Medical School? Don’t you think there could be a connection?”
“Well,” she said, “one of the doctors from Tulane was involved in that lab.”
Now, I was stunned. “Wait a second,” I countered and tried to get my bearings. “Are you telling me a professor from Tulane Medical School was involved in David Ferrie’s underground medical laboratory? The one with thousands of mice?”
“Oh, yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Everybody down at the medical school was talking about it. It was in that Playboy interview with Garrison that you had around here a couple years ago. I took it to Boston with me that Christmas to see your sister.”
“Who was the doctor?” I muttered. I could barely get the question out.
“Her name was Mary Sherman. Daddy knew her. He had a lot of respect for her. I think she was a pathologist. You know, she was more of a researcher than a physician. A cancer researcher, I think.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, resigning myself to the fact that some terrible fate must have befallen her.
“She was killed. Murdered. A terrible thing. Slashed with a knife, dismembered, and set on fire. It looked like a sexual killing, you know. But the grapevine said that whoever killed her knew what they were doing with a knife… maybe even had a high level of medical knowledge, just judging by the way the cuts were done. What a terrible way to go!”
“Did they figure out who did it?” I queried hopefully.
“No. The investigation was shut down all of a sudden. It was all hush-hush, like it had been shut down from above. But they think she knew her murderer and probably let them into her apartment.”
“You said Daddy knew her?”
“Oh, yes. They worked together for years. She was older and considerably higher up the ladder than he was, but Daddy always said that she was one of the top people in her field. He had a lot of respect for her. Professional respect, I mean.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“Yes, we had dinner at her apartment one night. A strange woman, but very sophisticated and very well traveled. And very into theatre and literature, I felt very out of place. All I could talk about was my children..”
“On July 23, 1964, however, the day after Mary Sherman’s murder, Oschner wrote a letter to his largest financial contributor saying “our government, our schools, our press, and our churches have become infiltrated with Communism.” – Page 185.
(It appears the communists must have forgotten to infiltrate “our hospitals” and we all know what the Nazis and the CIA did to “Communists” who attempted to destroy their for-profit hydrocarbon/munition model that profits from the sick and injured.)
“All of Mary Sherman’s scientific and medical books, treatises and equipment “of every kind, nature, and description” whether in her apartment, office or laboratory were given to the Alton Oschner Medical Foundation. The receipt for this bequest was signed by Dr. Alton Oschner himself.”… (on June 15, 1965.)
Chapter 13: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
… What of this fire? What was the temperature inside her apartment? And just how badly burned was Mary Sherman’s body?
The newspapers were of no help on this question. Other than generally describing her body as “charred,” all the press ever said about the damage to Dr. Sherman’s body was one quote which appeared on the last day of the 1964 press coverage. It read:
The fire smoldered for some time – long enough to denude an innerspring and burn away the flesh from one of the doctor’s arms.
It is interesting to consider that this was the only detail the public heard about the actual damage done to the victim’s body until the police reports were released nearly thirty years later.
The Precinct Report said:
From further examination of the body, it was noted by the coroner that the right arm and a portion of the right side of the body extending from the right hip to the right shoulder was completely burned away exposing various vital organs.
The cause of death was…. 5. Extreme burns of right side of body with complete destruction of right upper extremity and right side of thorax (chest) and abdomen.
The Homicide Report summarized these same autopsy findings and added:
The right side of the body from the waist to where the right shoulder should be, including the whole right arm, was apparently disintegrated from the fire, yielding the inside organs of the body.
Further, it describes the clothes which were piled on top of her body, some of which had never even burned.
The body was nude; however, there was clothing which had apparently been placed on top of her body, mostly covering the body from just above the pubic area to the neck. Some of the mentioned clothes had been burned completely, while others were still intact, but scorched.
According to the Criminologist, the mentioned clothes were composed of synthetic material which would have to reach a temperature of about 500 F before it would ignite into a flame; however, prior to this, there would be a smoldering effect.
Just to be clear, let me state what I think this saying. If the temperature in the bedroom reached 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees C) the clothes piled on top of Mary would have ignited and burned. Yet they did not. Therefore, the temperature in the room did not reach 500 degrees. The police, however, attributed the massive destruction to her body, including the disintegration of her right arm and the right side of her torso, to this less-than-500 degree fire.
Whatever burned off Mary’s right arm and right torso had to be extremely hot! how hot? Who would know what temperature it took to burn a bone? Perhaps someone who cremated bodies for a living. Since I did not know anyone in that line of work, I reached for the yellow pages and looked under “F” for funerals. After several calls, I reached a very personable and articulate man whose job it was to prepare cremated remains for burial.
“What temperature does it take to completely burn a body?” I asked promptly, expecting a quick answer with the precise number of degrees.
“Including bones?” he queried immediately.
“Well, that gets straight to the heart of the matter. Yes, including bones. I am writing a book about someone whose arm was completely burned off in a fire, and I am trying to figure out what temperature would be needed to do that.”
“Burned their arm off?” he exclaimed. “How unusual! What happened to the rest of the body?”
“It was more or less still intact,” I answered cautiously, concerned that he was going to get us off track.
“That’s bizarre,” he said. “I can’t imagine that. Are you sure it wasn’t cut off somehow?”
While he still had not given me the temperature number, I was impressed with how fast he got to the heart of the matter. I had not said anything about the nature of the death. It could have been a car wreck as far as he knew. But I was determined to get a cremation temperature from him before discussing any circumstantial evidence which might somehow color his answer. So I politely asked him to tell me the temperature of a cremation oven.
He said, “Well, the cremation machines are automatic nowadays so you don’t have to set them, but an average cremation takes about two hours at about 1,600 degrees. But when you are finished, there are still bones! Depending on body size and fat content, some take longer. I have seen them as high as 2000 degrees and for as long as three hours. But when you are finished, you still have bones, or at least pieces of bones like joints, skull fragments, and knuckles.
I now had my cremation number, but I was busy thinking about his answers. In the lull, he offered to give me some background on cremations and explained some popular misconceptions. The common belief, he said, it that you put a body in the cremation machine and get back ashes. No, that’s not how it works. Yes, it’s true that there are some ashes produced by burning skin and soft tissue, but that’s a relatively small portion of what remains. Most of what is left after cremation is a box of dry bone parts. The next step is to grind up those remains so that they are unrecognizable. The final product is bone dust, a powdery substance that resembles ashes. Hence, the term and the misconception. What cremation technically does is rapidly dehydrate the bone material so that it splinters. Then it can be ground into a powder more easily. But bones do not burn. To emphasize his point he explained that even the skull cap, which is in the direct path of flame during cremation frequently survives.
While he was being very helpful and I was learning more about cremation than I anticipated, my goal was still to get a temperature figure which would explain Mary’s missing right arm, so I pressed on. “Can you estimate what temperature it would take to completely burn off an arm?”
“Knuckles and all?” he countered.
“Everything,” I confirmed.
“Well, it’s hard to say. Before I got in the business, I saw a lot of burns. Some were military pilots who crashed their jets and got drenched in jet fuel. I would have to get the bodies out of the wreckage. Jet fuel burns at thousands of degrees, but there were still bones left. I also saw people who had been covered with napalm and the like. But there were still bones left. I can’t imagine how hot or how long it would take to completely burn a bone to the point of disintegration, but it’s way up there.”
I was getting his point. If Mary’s entire apartment building had been burning out of control and had caved on top of her body, it could not have produced the type of damage described in the police report. The smokey mattress and the smoldering pile of clothes with their less-than-500 degree temperature were certainly not capable of destroying the bones in Mary’s right arm and rib cage. Then a critical point hit me: The crime scene did not match the crime. It is impossible to explain the damage to Mary’s arm and the right side of her body with the evidence found in her apartment. Or to put it even more bluntly, the damage to Mary’s right arm and thorax did not occur in her apartment. It had to happen somewhere else. Her body was then quietly brought back to her apartment and deposited so it could be found there. A second fire was set to create an explanation, however tenuous, for the burns suffered earlier. It’s no wonder nobody heard anything.
Something else had happened to Mary earlier that evening. It would require something more violent than a common house fire to disintegrate her entire arm and right rib cage. It would take something that could generate thousands, if not millions, of degrees of heat for a fraction of a second, vaporizing and destroying everything in its path. Something more on the scale of lightening or a fireball from an extremely high voltage electrical source which would destroy any tissue in its path, but leave the rest of the body which did not hit relatively intact. Perhaps it was even an extremely powerful beam of high-energy electro-magnetic radiation just like the one that disintegrated electrical engineer Jack Nygard when he accidentally got stuck in the path of his 5,000,000 watt linear particle accelerator near Seattle, Washington….”
There was one lone survivor who worked in this underground bioweapons lab and she wrote a book about it.
Important excerpts from the 600 page book “Me and Lee: How I Came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald”
(A more accurate title would be “How we were deceived into building a bioweapon…”)
“Then Dr. Ferrie explained that their cancer project was getting results faster than typical research projects, because they did not have to do all the paperwork, and all this was under the direction of the great man himself, Dr. Alton Ochsner.
Dr. Ochsner again. So he was involved in this, too. Dr. Ferrie said Dr. Ochsner knew how to get things done.
He had access to anything needed and avoided red tape by bringing in some materials himself from Latin America. Ferrie described Ochsner’s Latin American connections in more detail, saying that he was the on-call physician for many Latin American leaders. He kept their secrets and got rewarded in return, including big donations to his Clinic. As a result, Ochsner had his own unregulated flow of funds and supplies for every possible kind of cancer research, with no oversight. “We’re using various chemicals, in combination with radiation, to see what happens with fast-growing cancers,” Ferrie said. “We’re using it to mutate monkey viruses too.”
Mutating monkey viruses! Radiation! Fast growing cancers!
“That’s exactly what I’ve been trained to handle,” I commented, noting how conveniently my skill set just happened to match their research.
“I was told you were,” Dr. Ferrie said, without explaining how he came by that particular piece of information, but I figured it had to be Dr. Ochsner… – page 140
The configuration of these labs was basically a circular process which repeated itself over and over. With each lap around the loop of laboratories, the cancer-causing viruses would become more aggressive, and more deadly. Originally, these viruses came from monkeys, but they had been enhanced with radiation. The virus we were most concerned with was SV40, the infamous carcinogenic virus that had contaminated the polio vaccines of the 1950s. But the science of the day was not terribly precise, and cross-infection between species was common in monkey labs. So it was impossible to know if we were working with SV40 only, or a collection of viruses.
We assumed there were probably other viruses traveling with it, but whether it was SV40 or SV37 or SIV did not really matter to us. What mattered was whether it produced cancer quickly. For our project, these cancer causing viruses had been transferred to mice because they were more economical than monkeys, and the viruses thrived just as easily, which is why mice are so widely used in medical research.
This loop included a large colony of thousands of mice kept in a house near Dave Ferrie’s apartment. I called it “the mouse house.” People connected to the Project handled the daily care and feeding of the mice, bred them to replace the population which was constantly being consumed. Several times each week, fifty or so live mice would be selected based upon apparent size of their tumors. These mice had tumors so large that they were visible to the naked eye. They would be placed in a cardboard box and quietly brought through he back door of Dave’s house for processing. Once in Dave’s kitchen, we would kill the mice with ether and harvest their tumors. Harvesting meant cutting their bodies open and excising the largest tumors. The tumors were then weighed, and their weights recorded in a journal. The odor was terrible The largest of the harvested tumors had a destiny. We first cut very thin slices from these tumors and examined them under a microscope. We had to be sure what kind of tumor we had, in each case. Bits of the “best” tumors were selected for individual treatment: each specimen was macerated, stained, mixed with RPMI medium, then poured into a carefully labeled test-tube. These were placed in Dave’s table centrifuge, and spun. Most cancer cells went to the bottom. The liquid on top was poured into a big flask, then more RPMI medium, with fetal calf serum, ad sometimes other materials, was added to each test tube. These were the beginnings of tissue cultures, to be grown elsewhere. – page 208
… Both Dave and Dr. Mary (Dr. Mary Sherman) began describing chilling experiments on human brains being conducted at Tulane by Dr. Robert Health…
Dave said, “Listen to this, J. ‘Dr. Health Tells New Technique. Electrical Impulses Sent Deep Into Brain… [a patient]… had tiny wires implanted into precise spots in his brain. The wires were attached to a self-stimulator box, which was equipped at a push button to deliver a tiny, electrical impulse to the brain…” Dave paused to let what he read sink in. “I wonder how many brains Health went through before he had success with these two. How long did it take to find those ‘precise spots’ in their brains with his hot little wires?”…
“I doubt John Q. Public will ever have a clue,” Dr. Mary replied. “They certainly have no idea they were getting cancer-causing monkey viruses in their polio vaccines,” she added bitterly. Seeing my expression of shock, Dr. Mary went on to explain that she and a few others had privately protested the marketing of the SV40-contaminated polio vaccine, but to no avail. The government continued to allow the distribution of millions of doses of the contaminated vaccine in America and abroad.
She said she was told that the new batches of the vaccine would be free of the cancerous virus, but privately she doubted it, noting that the huge stockpile of vaccines she knew were contaminated had not been recalled. To recall them would damage the public’s confidence, she explained.
I was speechless. Were they telling me that a new wave of cancer was about to wash over the world?
“The government is hiding these facts from the people,” Dave said, “so they won’t panic and refuse to take vaccines. But is it right? Don’t people have the right to be told the contaminant causes cancer in a variety of animals? Instead, they show you pictures in the newspaper of fashion models sipping the stuff, to make people feel safe.”
My mind raced. It was 1963. They had been distributing contaminated polio vaccines since 1955. For eight years! Over a hundred million doses! Even I had received it! A blood-curdling chill came over me…. – page 281
He is soft on Communism. He refuses to go to war. He lets his baby brother go after the Mob, and errant generals. He plans to retire Hoover and wants to tax “Big Oil.” He thinks he can get away with it, because he’s the Commander-in-Chief.”
I caught my breath, and glanced at Dr. Sherman as she began taking dishes from the table. The frown on her face told me they were deadly serious. Dave cleared his throat and coughed. “They’ll execute him,” Dave said, “reminding future Presidents who really controls this country… those who rise to the top will gain everything they ever hoped and look the other way.”
Dave’s hands trembled as he spoke. His nerves were as raw as his voice.
“If Castro dies first, we think the man’s life might be spared.”
“How?” I asked, as the weight of his comments began to sink in.
“If Castro dies, they’ll start jockeying for power over Cuba,” Dave said, “It will divide the coalition that is forming. It may save the man’s life.”
“Where… how did you get this information?” I pursued.
“You’re very young,” Dr. Sherman said. “But you have to trust us, just as we have to trust you. If we were really with them, you wouldn’t be privy to this information. These people have motive, the means, and the opportunity. They will seem as innocent as doves. But they’re deadly as vipers.”
“What about Dr. Ochsner?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Sherman said. “I can’t tell, Perhaps…”
“He’s an unknown element,” Dave broke in. “But we know he’s friends with the moneybags. He thinks Mary and I hate ‘the man,’ just as he does.”
“I think he might aid the others,” Dr. Sherman said. “Perhaps without even knowing it. He functions as a go-between. His interest was originally to bring down Castro, because he’s anti-Communist to the core. But he’s remarkably naive.”
Dr. Sherman explained that in the past, Cuban medical students came to the Ochsner Clinic to train. Now Castro was sending Cuba’s medical students to Russia. Ochsner resented this rejection. Some of those medical students realized that studying with Ochsner had made them rich and famous, so they were bitter about Castro’s denying them that right. Some of them were bitter enough to help kill Castro. Dr. Sherman’s comments called to mind Tony’s similar degree of hatred.
“The clock is ticking,” Dave said. “It’s going to require a lot of hard work if we’re going to succeed where all the others failed.”
“We believe we have something,” Dr. Sherman said. “But we want to see what you make of it,” soliciting my opinion and gently stroking my ego with her words. “Dr. Ochsner says you have serendipity.”
“Yes,” I replied. “He told me that.”
“It’s a rare compliment,” Dr. Sherman went on. “You induced lung cancer in mice faster than had ever been done before, under miserable lab conditions. Dr. Sherman reached over and took my hand, squeezing it warmly. “That’s what Ochsner likes about you. Your serendipity. And we know you’re a patriot. That’s why you’re here.”
“This is lung cancer we’re talking about,” Dave said as he began smoking his third cigarette in five minutes. “Your specialty.”
“That’s what they wanted me to work with, ever since Roswell Park,” I admitted.
“You’re untraceable,” Dave continued. “With no degree, nobody will suspect you, because you’re working at Reily’s, and you’re practically a kid.
“We have only until October,” Dr. Sherman said.
“Maybe the end of October,” Dave amended, as he snubbed out his half-smoked cigarette.
“You can choose not to participate,” Dr. Sherman told me.
“Yeah, we’ll just send you over to Tulane to see Dr. Heath. A few days in his tender care, and you’ll never even remember this conversation took place,” Dave said.
“You’re not funny! Sherman snapped at Dave, seeing my face. “Of course, nothing will happen to you, Judy. Dr. Ferrie and I are the visible ones, not you.
“Hell, I was joking,” Dave said.
“She is so young,” Dr. Sherman said reproachfully. “You frightened her.”
“I’m sorry, J.” He said. “What are you, nineteen?”
“I will be twenty, on the 15th,” I said softly.
Dr. Mary saw that I was trembling. She poured me a little glass of cordial and offered it to me, saying that it would relax me, but I declined to drink it.
“All I came here for was to have an internship with you, Dr. Sherman,” I said, adding that I still wanted to go to Tulane Medical School in the fall.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be there,” Dr. Sherman said. “Dr. Ochsner said he’ll sponsor you. That’s set in stone. – page 283 – 284
With the early-week crunch over, I took myself over to Dave’s lab and Mary Sherman’s apartment on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to continue our work on the Project. When I finished, as per instructions from Dr. Mary, I wrapped the specimens in newspaper to insulate them and dropped them in a car parked near Eli Lilly on my way back to Reily’s. That was usually Lee’s job, but this week I did it. Once the product was dropped off a driver would get into the car and whisk it away for another round of radiation, presumable at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. – page 315
Dr. Ochsner wanted to speed up the Project. He called me at Reily’s several times to ask for ideas. I offered him several. One recommendation was that we try to transfer from mice to monkeys again, but this time the monkeys should be exposed to radiation beforehand to suppress their immune systems. Ochsner liked the idea and noted that they had concentrated their radiation efforts on tissue cultures, not living hosts. I was surprised they had not done this earlier, since I had told them back in 1961 that I had used this method to develop cancer in mice more rapidly. So I recommended irradiating the monkeys to expedite things, and Dr. Ochsner agreed. – page 320
As an Executive Director at the International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw was at the center of the international trade community in New Orleans. Shaw’s mentors, Ted Brent and Lloyd Cobb, had deep connections to both Dr. Ochsner and the CIA. Connections between Dr. Ochsner and Ted Brent were so strong that Brent left the fortune he had amassed during his lifetime to Ochsner Clinic upon his death. The hotel on campus of Ochsner Clinic is named Brent House, in his honor. – page 325
That afternoon, Mr. Monaghan agreed to clock me and Lee out, so we could meet at 4:30 near Eli Lilly..
“Nobody should be denied medical care,” he said. “It’s a basic human right! Just as the right to own a house. The people in this country are serfs and slaves… And hell, if they get sick and are new in town, they can drop dead. Nobody cares. We’re living in a world as barbaric as ancient Rome!”
“Maybe Rome had some things better,” I offered, noting Rome had heated floors and trained doctors two thousand years ago. That led to Lee’s taking out the book, Everyday life in Ancient Rome, from the library for us to study.
About the same time, Lee created a fake health card for himself so he’d have vaccination ‘proof’— necessary for travel to backward countries. His vaccinations were up-to-date, thanks to Dr. Ochsner, but he couldn’t put that name on his health card. Instead he used the fake name “Dr. A.J. Hideel.” There was that name again! I’d seen it on the third floor at Banister’s, and a variation on a fake FPCC membership card Lee carried. “Hidell,” Lee told me, was a ‘project name’ used on fake ID’s to access certain funds. Further, he said he was not the only person using the name….
“Dr. Mary noticed me staring at the equipment.
“The marmosets are dying,” she told me somberly. “All of them, including our control group.”
I pondered the implications. Our bioweapon had migrated between the two groups of monkeys, presenting the terrifying possibility that our mutated cancer was not only transferable, but actually contagious. We both knew that from this moment on we needed to be concerned about being exposed to a contagious, cancer-causing virus.
For the next hour, I worked with the microscopes, until Dave showed up. As my eyes were tired, I decided to help Lee, whose hands were now thrust inside the clean box’s gloves, and leave the microscope work to Dr. Mary. I bent down and kissed his perspiring forehead.
“You shouldn’t touch me,” he said, through his face mask.
“I’m going to help,” I told him, putting on my lab coat. I could see a book in Lee’s pocket through the clear plastic apron. “I see you brought along Profiles of Courage,” I said to Lee, hoping he was finished with it, and I could borrow it from him.
“I’m trying to get my hands on everything I can about ‘The Chief,’” Lee answered… – page 386
Wednesday, July 10, 1963
I received an important call at Reily’s from Dr. Bowers, who told me Dr. Ochsner had asked him to relay the good news to me. He said that cells isolated from two of the lymphoma strains from the mice had produced dramatic results in the marmoset monkeys. They suffered from not one, but two variations of a galloping cancer. We had broken the barrier between mouse and monkey. Now we could move on to specific types of lung cancers, but would need to keep the mouse cancers going, in case a failure occurred, when we moved from marmoset monkeys to African Green monkeys. – page 383
“All right,” I said. “What agency do you really work for, and who is your most important handler?”
“You little spy!” he said, smiling. “Here’s the answer: I’m loaned to the CIA, and must sometimes help the FBI; but who my main handler is, not even God knows the answer to that. Certainly, I don’t. I call him “Mr. B.”
“As for me,” I told him, “I’m just a pair of hands belonging to Ochsner.”
“They don’t belong to Ochsner anymore,” Lee said. “They’re mine now.”
I asked him if I had a “handler.” Lee said, smiling, “Of course you do. It’s me.” He said I was a lucky woman. “I shall be your protector,” he said. “I won’t let any of them hurt you.”
I asked why would anybody want to hurt me? I was on the ‘good’ side. Lee explained: if you’re no longer useful, you could be thrown out, unless you were educated.
“You’re safer than I am,” he told me. “Officially, you were supposedly an unwitting asset. A good position to be in… – page 389
Lee asked if there was anything he still didn’t know about the cancer research project. “Well, you should know about the etiology of the cancer,” I told him. “I’ve never discussed it with you.”
“Etiology? What’s that mean?”
“Etiology means origins. This is no ordinary cancer, as you know,” I reminded him He agreed.
“It’s probably contagious,” I went on. That startled him, since Dr. Mary and I had not really discussed this point explicitly in front of him. I told him that the monkey virus, now altered by radiation, had moved spontaneously from the deliberately infected marmoset monkeys to the control animals. With it came cancer and all the marmoset monkeys were now dying. That’s why there were suddenly all the extra precautions in Dave’s lab.
“Remind me not to eat or drink anything over at Dave’s,” Lee said soberly as he pondered the idea of working around a contagious cancer virus…
“We’ve created a galloping cancer,” I went on. “I think a bacteriophage could be altered to take out even these cancer cells. But nobody’s going down that road. We’re developing this weapon to eliminate a head of state. But what if we get Castro? Will they really just throw this stuff away? I asked, shivering at the thought.
“It could be used as a weapon of mass destruction,” Lee answered simply…
Lee asked how many people understood the science behind the Project. I told him Ochsner, Sherman, Dave and I surely knew how it was made and that I knew there were some other doctors involved, but once the bioweapon was created, it could be kept frozen for years and used by anyone who had access to it at some point in the future. We sank into deep silence as we contemplated the dimensions of what we had just said. How had my dream to cure cancer gone so wrong? – pages 390 – 391
July 19, 1963 Friday
That morning, Lee was on the Magazine Street bus with me in time to arrive at Reily’s before 8:00 A.M…. I clocked in shortly before 8:00 A.M., but I needed Lee to run an errand to Eli Lilly’s for the Project, so despite his efforts to be on time, he clocked in late again and got chewed out. For the rest of the day, Lee’s supervisors were all over him.
Lee advised Dave to keep an eye on me, but not to say a word—unless I got up to leave— until he got there. I gave Dave Lewis a grateful hug, then followed Lee to an old car that he had access to for the day, due to his training film project. This was an unusual car called a Kaiser-Frazer, which was discontinued in 1951. It was a roomy and surprisingly luxurious dark green 4-door sedan. I had seen it parked near the Eli Lilly office several times.
“You might want to take me to take you straight home,” Lee said, “if you’re too tired. But if you come along with me, you’ll get to see Carlos Marcello’s plantation.”…
This meeting was necessary, because it was time to test the Project’s biological weapon on primates. It had worked on the Marmoset monkeys, so it was time to try it on African green monkeys, which were closer to humans but considerably more expensive. These next steps involved the precise work that needed to be done in the monkey laboratory, so others would do that.
I had to discuss the details with Dr. Ochsner. After much of this technical talk, Ochsner said, “By the way, your boy Oswald is going to be a movie star.”
“I know he’s working on a film,” I said cautiously, not knowing how much Ochsner was privy to.
“I don’t mean out there,” Ochsner said suggesting that he knew about the training camp. “I mean here in New Orleans, on TV. Do you have a TV set?”…
“Sir,” I said proudly, “he doesn’t spend a dollar of the Project’s money unless he has to. He’s a patriot of the first order.”
“Well, he’s all of that,” Ochsner agreed. “I don’t deny it. I’ve taken the trouble to look into his records. And I’m thinking about better ways to use his talents.”
“He wants to go to college, sir,” I said. “Can you help him?”
“Young lady, we want him to stay put a while, where he’s most useful.” Realizing that he was clearly talking about using Lee as a spy, I realized that Ochsner thought of himself as part of the management of that operation, not just a technical resource working for Lee’s spymasters.
“So, who am I really working for?” I asked Ochsner bluntly. He shook his head from side to side in dismay and said that I was asking a lot of questions today, as if talking to a wall.
Then, he turned to me and said: “You’re working for the foes of Communism.” After a short pause, he smiled and added, “I’m not ashamed to say that I would spill every drop of blood I have for my country. And I have always known that you feel the same way.”
Ochsner then glanced at his watch, cut me off with a wave of his hand, and handed me a stack of new material to read. “Read these for us, and give us your input as soon as possible. The final step will be with our human volunteer.”
“Have you already found one?” I queried.
“You would be surprised,” Dr. Ochsner replied, standing up and learning me to the door. “There are many unsung heroes who have bravely stepped forward to accomplish the impossible.” Then he added, a little sadly. “There are risks that must be taken for great causes.”
“Am I doing alright, sir?” I asked meekly. “It feels strange, not preparing for Tulane yet. I mean, all I’ve looked at for months now are cancer cells.”
As for Lee and me, we wanted to abandon the rat race to others. “We’ll leave their money and corruption behind,” Lee said. “We’ll be like Lord and Lady Blakeney. We’ll play the old part… “Maybe I could talk to Dr. Diehl,” I said hopefully. Dr. Harold Diehl had been fond of me, and I knew I could talk to him in private. He had concerns for safety in cancer research. I found his card in my black purse.
But Lee pointed out that Diehl, the Senior Vice President for Research for the American Cancer Society and Ochsner the former ACS President, had been pals for years. Their friend, “Wild Bill” Donovan (who died of cancer despite Ochsner’s efforts) had been a leading ACS official, too, and was the founding father of the CIA. Diehl would probably do nothing. – page 457 – 458
I personally trained Lee and Dave to handle the materials and prepared the bioweapon for safe transport to the mental hospital, but I did not accompany them on this first trip, so what I report here is what Lee and Dave told me…
Lee and Dave were both qualified to instruct other technicians as to how to handle and work with the bioweapon. At Jackson, Dave gave the injections and explained to those involved how further injections should be given, and when. Lee watched and listened, so he would be able to deliver similar instructions when he handed off the Product in Mexico City or Cuba. Lee left after viewing the first round of injections, and one saw one prisoner, because he needed to go to the Personnel office. There, Lee filled out an employment application to establish a motive for his planned return to the hospital in about 72 hours, when he would have to drive me there to check on the progress of the experiment. Afterwards, Shaw drove Lee and Dave home.
But here was the problem: I was originally told that the prisoner was terminally ill and had “volunteered” to be injected with cancerous cells, knowing his days were numbered. But, a simple fact remained: in order to do my blood test, I had to know what kind of cancer the volunteer had so I could distinguish between “his cancer” and “our cancer.” Right before the Team left for Jackson, I asked Dave to find out what kind of cancer the prisoner had.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Dave said matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t have cancer. He’s a Cuban who is about the same age and weight as Castro, and he’s healthy.”
I felt a chill sweep through my body. My heart turned over. This revelation was sickening to me. We would be giving cancer to a healthy human with the intention of killing him. This was not medicine, it was murder. It was wrong, morally, ethically, and legally. They had gone too far….
My note to Dr. Ochsner simply stated: Injecting disease-causing materials into an unwitting subject who does not have a disease is unethical. I signed it with my initials, J.A., and hand delivered it to Dr. Ochsner’s office at his Clinic…
“I’m so sorry,” she told me. “He’s making a mountain out of a molehill.” This was a hint that Dr. Mary was still on my side, which was a huge relief to me. I hoped she would give me good references to a medical school in Latin America, which was one of the plans Lee and I considered. The only positive note she had to offer was that Dr. Ochsner had agreed to a civil exit interview… – page 470
When Dr. Ochsner entered the room, the look on his face was unforgiving. Without a word, he handed me some important blood work code sheets, with which to make my reports. Then, rising to his feet, he exploded into a flurry of unrestrained verbal abuses. It was unlike anything I had ever encountered…
“When you finish your assignment at Jackson,” he said, “Give us the results and consider your work with us over. After his ruse burned a little further, he said, “Consider yourself lucky you’re walking out with your teeth still in your head. Now get out.” – page 472 – 473
“This was the same old Kaiser-Frazer that Lee (as in Lee Harvey Oswald) had used to drive me to Churchill Farms for Marcello’s gathering. I thought of it as the Eli Lilly car, because I had seen in parked near their building several times. Lee said it was more reliable than Dave’s car and it had no known mechanical problems.” – Me and Lee page 476.
The plan to kill Castro depended on two to three people: First, a doctor to influence diagnostics for the required x-rays, then an x-ray technician to rig the machine to temporarily deliver a dangerous dose, (creating symptoms of an infection and pulling down the immune system) and someone to contaminate the penicillin shots given to overcome the presumed ‘pneumonia’ or ‘infection’, with the deadly cancer cocktail. Reactions to the foreign material would bring on fever, with more x-rays to check for ‘pneumonia’ —and more penicillin or similar shots. Only one shot had to reach a vein, and it was over, if the X-rays had been used. For this was a galloping cancer: Castro’s chances, if it worked in humans as it did in monkeys, were zero. It had killed the African green monkeys in only two weeks. Castro’s death by cancer would be ascribed to “natural causes.”
Lee told me that after the cancer cells were removed from their glass container, he then observed the volunteer being x-rayed and injected. After that, Dave asked him to leave. Why? This made Lee suspicious… – page 477
I checked the blood work data while a centrifuge spun down the rest of the freshly-drawn blood samples to pellets, inspecting slides and the blood counts already prepared for me. My task was to match the recorded data with the slides, and to look for any cancer cells there. A few were present—an excellent sign that the bioweapon worked. The original cancer cells had been tagged with a radioactive tracer. If any of those were also found in the pellets, the volunteer was surely doomed. But there were too many blood samples for just one client. …
Having done that, I insisted that I needed to observe the prisoner’s current condition to see how he was physically reacting. The orderly reluctantly took me to the door of the prisoner’s room, but said that I was not allowed past the door. The room was barred, but basically clean. Several storage boxes sat on the floor and some flowers sat on a stand next to the bed. The patient was tied to the bed and was thrashing around in an obvious fever. It was very sad and I felt sorry for what I had done, but I played my part and pretended to be pleased with his status.
We had spent no more than forty-five minutes at the hospital, and once back in the car, Lee and I discussed what I had seen. I told him that I was almost sure there was more than one “volunteer.” Lee asked me to describe the patient to him, which I did. Lee then pointed out that the hairline and nose were different from the patient that he had seen injected. Between Lee’s comments and the number of variety of blood samples, I became convinced. More than one “volunteer” had been injected to test the effectiveness of the bioweapon. – page 479 – 481
A car and driver was waiting outside of International House to take Lee and Hugh Ward to an airport in Houma, Louisiana (about an hour southwest of New Orleans). But first, they had to pick up a package from the nearby offices of Eli Lilly that needed to be delivered to someone in Austin. After getting the package from Eli Lilly, the trio headed to the Huoma-Terre-bonne Airport, known to locals as “the blimp station.” Lee said they reached the blimp station without undue delay. – page 495
It said that Alex Rorke had “run into some trouble,” and he and his pilot might be “missing.”
This was instantly a concern to Lee because, not only was Alex Rorke one of his trusted friends from his nefarious anti-Castro world, he was also the man who was going to fly me from Florida to Mexico when it was time for Lee and me to disappear, which might be this week.. The Latinos, meanwhile were eating lunch with some anti-Castro friends and had promised to seek news about Alex Rorke. When they returned, they dropped Lee at the Trek Cafe on South Congress Avenue, where he waited for about forty-five minutes while they dropped off the package from Eli Lilly in the biology building at St. Edward’s University – page 496 & 497
He deposited one of his two suitcases in a locker in the bus station, so he would have some clothes to wear when he returned to Mexico. It was now obvious to Lee that he had been betrayed, and his actions at the consulate would further stain him as a pro-Castro fanatic, making him an even more convincing patsy in Kennedy’s murder.
“They think I’m a blind fool!” Lee told me soon after. “If they don’t want me for Cuba anymore, I’m better off dead than alive to them.” – page 501
“You’ll be working a lot of hours,” Dave warned me.
“So what?” I mused, thinking I’d be happy creating exotic chemicals for esoteric scientific projects. Dave had told me that some of these would be sent to New Orleans via such routes as the Mound Park Hospital in St. Petersburg, Eastman Kodak, and our familiar chemical supplier, Eli Lilly, including materials similar to antifreeze, which could be used to safely deep-freeze the deadly cancer cell lines, keeping alive virtually forever. page 503- 504
When I heard his strained voice, I realized that something sinister was blowing in the wind…
“I won’t live to see another birthday cake,” he said quietly, “unless I can get out of here. And if I don’t do it right, we’ll all get killed.”
To my gasp of horror, he added, “I’m sorry. You have to hear it.” I now learned that upon his return to Dallas, Lee had been invited to be an actual participant in the assassination plans against JFK.
“You know what that means,” he warned me. I did.
“So, you’re going to go through with it?”
“I’m going to have to go through with it. Who else is in position to penetrate this, and stop it?”
I started to cry, feeling both hopeless and helpless.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “It’s killing me! I can’t stand your crying like that.”
I suddenly felt faint, and accidentally dropped the phone. When I picked up the phone again, we tried to comfort each other. But then Lee revealed that he had decided to send on any information he could about the assassination ring. He was convinced that his information could make a huge difference.
Lee was spending evenings with men who were plotting the death of the President of the United States— men who would stop at nothing to gain more power. They might even be able to blame it on Castro, impelling Americans to war against Cuba, and thus killing two big birds with one big stone. Lee and I both believed that an invasion of Cuba could trigger WWIII, if Russia moved in to defend her Communist ally in the Caribbean.
“I know you think I’m a good shot,” he told me. “Truth is, I’m not that good. So why would they recruit me?”
Lee made a bitter laugh. “They’ll set me up. You see how they hung me out to dry in Mexico City?” he went on. “Now they’ve put off my return to Mexico until after Christmas. I’m going to be snuffed, just as I told you, way back.”
But he felt he had to stay on, with so much as stake. There was now no way to persuade Lee to save himself. In fact, he would have thought it immoral of me to suggest it at the expense of President Kennedy. – page 505
The plot against President Kennedy thickened in November. By now, Lee had convinced me that Kennedy was a great president who sought peace, and I shared Lee’s fear that his life would soon end. Lee had been recruited in the Baton Rouge meetings into the Dallas plot. He had penetrated the ring. Now, he was meeting with one or more plotters on a regular basis. “But I’m meeting too many people,” he told me…
Lee said the motorcade would turn at the 3600 block “because the plotters want to show their power… that they are in charge of their trophy. They would also be taking trophy photos of the assassination.
At this time, Lee believed the kill site would probably be the Dallas Trade Mart—if Kennedy wasn’t terminated earlier in Chicago or Miami. Sickening to me and Lee was their plan to circulate a photo of JFK’s head, “dead, with his eyes left open.” – page 515
Saturday, November 16, 1963
Lee met with an FBI contact at a location unknown to me, revealing that a right-wing group was planning to assassinate President Kennedy during his visit to Dallas on November 22nd. Someone in the FBI took the information seriously and sent out a teletype message to field offices that night. William Walter, a clerk in the FBI office in New Orleans, saw this telex the following morning and later affirmed he had seen this document to Jim Garrison when he investigated the JFK assassination in the late 1960s. The FBI claimed it could find no copies of such a document, but that hardly surprises me. – page 516
“Know how we wondered who my handler was?” Lee whispered. “Mr. B? Benson, Benton, or Bishop? Well, he’s from Fort Worth, so it has to be Phillips. His is the traitor. Phillips is behind this. I need you to remember that name,” Lee said, repeating it with cold anger. “David Atlee Phillips.”
Lee then said there were two other names I needed to remember: Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes. He said the assassination itself was not their doing, but it was because of them, and I was never to forget their names…
“They’d just get another gun to take my place,” Lee said. “If I stay, that will be one less bullet aimed at Kennedy.” – page 521
“Maybe I can still do something,” he added, grasping at a straw, “but what bothers me the most is that they’re going to say I did it. They’re going to pin it on me. And what will my babies think of me, when they grow up?” – page 523
I went to work at PenChem, as I’d done every day for the previous six weeks….
Shortly after 1:30 P.M. Florida time (12:30 P.M. Dallas time), the television erupted with an announcement that the President had been seriously wounded by gunfire in Dallas. Soon, the network cut away from its regular programming. I can’t remember the words; I only remember my horror. About a half-hour later, we heard news that a priest had given his last rites. The news was greeted with cheers and whistles of approval in the lab. Tears started running down my cheeks, despite my efforts to hide them…
Mr. Mays noticed. “Are you a God-damned Communist?” – page 526 – 527
The phone rang as soon as I reached it. Dave was as nervous as I was and apologized for calling a few minutes early. I told him I was glad he did. Then I heard Dave make a sound as though he were choking. I realized he was swallowing back his tears. “Oh, my God, J,” he said to me. “I won’t hide it from you.”
Dave was crying. I started crying, too. I didn’t think I had any tears left, but there they were, stinging my eyes. I was so anxious to hear what he had to say.
“It’s hopeless. If you want to stay alive,” Dave warned me, with a strained voice, “it’s time to go into the catacombs. Promise me you will keep your mouth shut!” he added. “I don’t want to lose you, too,” he said, his voice choking on his words. I felt weak all over. “If there is any chance to save him, we’ll get him out of there, I swear to you. So play the dumb broad, and save yourself. Remember, Mr. T will watch every step you make.
Dave meant I was being watched by “Santos” Trafficante, the Godfather of Tampa and Miami. He was also a good friend and ally of Carlos Marcello. Fortunately, Marcello liked me, which is why I believed that I had a chance to survive any threats from that direction.
“I’ll call you one more time. After that, I can’t call anymore,” Dave said “And now I have other calls to make. So, Vale, Soror” (“Be strong, sister.”) – page 530 – 531
“The Texas Court of Appeals overturned Jack Ruby’s conviction and on December 7, 1966 ordered a new trial to be held outside of Dallas. Two days later, Ruby became ill and entered Parkland Hospital where doctors initially thought he had pneumonia, but quickly changed their diagnosis to lung cancer. Before the week was over, the Parkland doctors announced that Ruby’s lung cancer had advanced so far that it could not be treated (meaning it had spread to other parts of the body—Stage IV). The median survival time of a patient with Stage IV lung cancer is eight months, but twenty-seven days after the onset of his initial symptoms of cough and nausea, Jack Ruby was dead. Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox was Ruby’s jailer at the time. He later told researchers that Jack Ruby told him of being injected with cancer and handed him a note making that claim. Maddox also remembered what he described as a “phony doctor” had visited Ruby shortly before he became sick. A second law enforcement officer said Ruby had been placed in an x-ray room for about 15 minutes with the x-ray machine running constantly, an action that would have certainly compromised his immune system. The autopsy found the main concentration of cancer cells to be in Ruby’s right lung, but noted that cancer cells had spread throughout his body. These cells were sent to nearby Southwest Medical School for closer scrutiny using an electron microscope. Bruce McCarty, the electron microscope operator that examined Ruby’s cells had microvilli (tentacle-like extensions that grow out of the main cell), since microvilli were normally not seen in lung cancers. A decade later, however, cancer researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York noted that when cancer cells of various types and origins were suspended in specialized liquids they would form microvilli extensions “when settling on glass.” This is consistent with my description of the need to separate their suspended cancer cells from the sides of the glass thermos every couple days.” – page 561
Former CIA Asset Antonio Veciana independently confirms what Lee told Judyth in his book, “Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots Against Castro, Kennedy, and Che.”
Preface
Bishop knew I was responsible for the arsons that destroyed some of Havana’s best-known department stores, which led to something I could never forgive myself for, the death of an innocent mother of two,… Bishop knew I was responsible for sparking the mass exodus of thousands of Cuban children known as “Operation Pedro Pan”— disguised as orphans, and with the help of the Catholic Church. Bishop knew I came close to collapsing Cuba’s economy with a rumor campaign meant to sow panic….. My name is Antonio Veciana. I am an accountant by training, a banker and businessman by trade. Some call me a patriot. Some call me a terrorist. Only one knew I was a spy, with a single mission—destroy Castro. My CIA handler, the man I knew as Maurice Bishop. The man whom congressional investigators later identified as master spy David Atlee Phillips. The man whom I saw meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.Chapter 3: The Bearded Ones
When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, David Atlee Phillips was already there…
I had left the Banco Nacional before Fidel declared victory. I went to work for Julio Lobo, the richest man in Cuba. Lobo was Cuba’s first millionaire and, at the time of the revolution, its richest man. His personal fortune was so immense, people in Havana and Miami still wistfully exclaim, “To be as rich as Julio Lobo!”….
As my trial drew closer, my attorney had more questions… I remember thinking how curious it was that someone would conspire to smuggle drugs with someone they thought worked for the government—especially someone with the CIA.. I was convicted on all three counts on January 14, 1974. The judge sentenced me to two concurrent terms of seven years, plus three years of probation…
They released me after twenty-six months. I got home in February 1976, just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations was beginning its work. Soon after my return, committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi started calling my house, asking to see me. We met for the first time at the beginning of March. He didn’t mention the Kennedy assassination. He said he wanted to ask about connections between groups like Alpha 66 and U.S. Intelligence agencies.
I ended up telling him about Bishop. The whole story. About Cuba and the attempt to kill Castro with the bazooka, about Bishop telling me to found Alpha 66, about Chile. And I told him about meeting Lee Harvey Oswald.
Gaeton tried not to look surprised. He tried not to let his excitement show in his voice. But as he himself told it later, “In my mind, I fell off my chair.”
That’s because he hadn’t been fully honest with me when he introduced himself. He was investigating links between anti-Castro groups and the CIA. That was true. But he was actually interested in the assassination. AS an HSCA investigator, he was precisely charged with looking into whether U.S. intelligence agencies had anything to do with Kennedy’s death.
And I had just given him the thing so many suspected, and so many feared, but no one had found before—a direct link between a significant CIA figure and John Kennedy’s alleged assassin, or at least the “patsy” for the crime, as Oswald called himself…
Before the House Select Committee on Assassinations finished its work, someone tried to silence me. With a bullet.
I had testified in secret before a congressional panel. I told them about the assassination attempts against Castro and about El Che’s diary. I told them about Alpha 66 and about Oswald. And I told them how a man I knew only as Maurice Bishop had been responsible for it all…. Fonzi and other committee investigators were able to confirm much of what I told them. The committee had also determined that, even though the CIA insisted I had never been one of its operatives, the agency’s records contained a “piece of arguably contradictory evidence—a record of $500 in operational expenses, given to Veciana by a person with whom the CIA had maintained a long-standing operational relationship.”..
Police said the gunman used a .45-caliber silencer. The first shot had come through the side mirror, splintering on its way through. A piece of it had hit me. It lodged above my ear… The doctors said the bullet that grazed my belly was the one that could have killed me.
“You’re lucky they used a .45,” one of the cops told me. “The .45 comes out of the barrel slower. If they used a 9 mm you’d be dead.”
Epilogue
I knew who “Bishop” really was the instant I saw David Phillip’s photograph. Why didn’t I say so then? I was afraid. I believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. And I believe that even if David Atlee Phillips wasn’t part of it, he knew about it. He had to. Why else would he have met with Oswald in Dallas, less than three months before the assassination? And why else would he have asked me to help connect Oswald with the Cuban Embassy in Mexico?…
Eli Lilly was instrumental in creating the bioweapon intended to kill Fidel Castro. They provided all the supplies. They also held exclusive rights to the US distribution of thalidomide that John F Kennedy warned women about on national TV. (Eli Lilly acquired Distillers in 1962.) Kennedy had an actual scientist heading the FDA who rejected the approval of thalidomide in the US. Didn’t stop Eli Lilly from distributing 2 million pills directly to physicians who gave them out like candy to pregnant mothers. Eli Lilly was also the last supplier of DES and were fully aware that it was banned for chickens in the 50s for causing massive biological harm. Eli Lilly is still the last distributor of rBST or rRBGH the petroleum-based synthetic hormone chemical pumped into poor cows that destroys their health and contaminates our dairy supplies…
“Thimerosal is an organic compound that is 49.6 percent ethylmercury. Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based drug giant, developed and registered thimerosal under its trade name Merthiolate in 1929 and began marketing it as an antibacterial, antifungal product. It became the most widely used preservative in vaccines….
By 1935, Eli Lilly’s Jameison had further evidence of thimerosal’s toxicity when he received a letter from a researcher who had injected it into dogs and saw severe local reactions, leading him to state: “Merthiolate is unsatisfactory as a preservative for serum intended for use on dogs.”
http://inthesetimes.com/article/649/eli_lilly_and_thimerosal
“Lilly’s patent on thimerosal is about up, Kirby said, and it is still used in flu shots administered to children in doses that “contain 25 micrograms of mercury, which is more than what a 500-pound person could handle, according to the EPA.”
The Eli Lilly rider was attached to the Homeland Security Act for a reason… zero liability for damages..
“… the Dick Ammey “Lilly Rider” slipped into the 2002 Homeland Security Act, and the FDA’s approval to double the doses of aluminum adjuncts in several vaccines.” – Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC by James Ottar Grundvig (Page 257)
Researchers show where the aluminum travels to in the body and stays after vaccination
Deadly shots: the polio vaccine saga
The eight scientists gathered in the meeting room at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne included the key researchers who had helped turn the tide in the fight against polio in Australia.But the mood was far from celebratory as the meeting started on May 1, 1962. The team responsible for developing and producing the local version of the Salk polio vaccine in 1956, which had been given to millions of Australians during the following years, was faced with a crisis.Four days earlier CSL biochemist John Withell had completed laboratory tests that confirmed what had been feared: the latest batch of polio vaccine was contaminated with a newly discovered virus that came from monkey kidneys used to produce it.The virus had been designated SV40 – the 40th simian virus that had been identified – but this virus, first discovered by British researchers the previous year, was different. Tests in the United States had shown it could cause aggressive cancers in small animals and was not killed in the normal process used to manufacture polio vaccine.
In the words of Withell, who went on to become head of the government’s Therapeutic Goods Administration laboratories in Canberra, SV40 “was recognised straight away as a fairly nasty virus”.
“In April, more than 60 scientists met in Chicago to discuss the controversial virus and how it works to defeat certain cells’ natural defenses against cancer.
“I believe that SV40 is carcinogenic (in humans),” said Dr. Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. “We need to be creating therapies for people who have these cancers, and now we may be able to because we have a target – SV40.”
For four decades, government officials have insisted that there is no evidence the simian virus called SV40 is harmful to humans. But in recent years, dozens of scientific studies have found the virus in a steadily increasing number of rare brain, bone and lung-related tumors – the same malignant cancer SV40 causes in lab animals.
Even more troubling, the virus has been detected in tumors removed from people never inoculated with the contaminated vaccine, leading some to worry that those infected by the vaccine might be spreading SV40.
“How long can the government ignore this?” asked Dr. Adi Gazdar, a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center cancer researcher. “The government has not sponsored any real research. Here’s something possibly affecting millions of Americans, and they’re indifferent.
“Maybe they don’t want to find out.”
https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Rogue-virus-in-the-vaccine-Early-polio-vaccine-2899957.php
The Silent War 