It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of one of America’s most prominent historians—a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Book Award winner—that I first heard what I later came to think of as “The Question.”
Enroute from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where I would spend the next two years researching and writing a book about renowned CIA pilot-turned-infamous drug smuggler Barry Seal, I stopped to visit Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton, the writers who first brought serious national attention to the CIA operation in Mena, Arkansas led by Oliver North, and Barry Seal.
We were drinking cokes in the warm sun and exchanging tidbits of information each of us had gleaned about our common subject, when at one point Morris leaned forward.
“What have you heard,” he asked, “about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?”
I stared at him blankly. I replied that I didn’t know there had even been a get-away plane. And that was the end of it. The conversation quickly moved on. But the moment changed my life. In the two years of research which followed, I never forgot the question.
Months later, while collecting old news clippings in Barry’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I struck up a conversation about Seal with the morgue librarian at the Baton Rouge Advocate. She had a kind of smoky whiskey voice you generally don’t associate with librarians.
“Its another world, New Orleans”
“Hell, she said, “a good 20 years. I’ve been remarried for ten.”
Later, after I heard a story about Barry Seal from John Odom, a friend and classmate of Seal’s in high school, I began to realize that the rumor might be something more than that. While it wasn’t common knowledge, in certain circles in Louisiana it is what is known as an “open secret.”
Big shout out to Oliver Stone
Even if you’re not a JFK assassination researcher—and I wasn’t—you know who Ferrie was. Everyone’s seen Joe Pesci’s brilliant portrayal of Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Many recall that Ferrie – just forty-eight hours after Kennedy died—was brought in for questioning on suspicion that he had been involved in the assassination.
Odom watched them confer, he said, and saw Ferrie point to the 50-or-so wooden crates staged next to the tarmac.
On the way back to Baton Rouge, Barry Seal told him that he was working for Ferrie, who he said was “CIA.” (Ferrie’s CIA link was confirmed by Victor Marchetti, former Deputy Assistant to Richard Helms, who testified that Helms disclosed, in executive discussions during the Garrison investigation, that Ferrie had in fact been employed by the CIA.)
“Seal said he making $400 a week flying “runs” of crates of weapons and ordinance for Ferrie,” said Odom. He asked me, How’d you like to make that kind of money?”
Odom said he told Barry, ‘I’ll think about it.’ But they never discussed it again. Decades later, the incident remains puzzling to Odom. “Our dad made about $400 a month back then, and we weren’t poor, but I was stunned and didn’t know what to say.”
Translated into today’s money, Barry Seal was making $2500 weekly…on the weekends.
A piece of real history slipped through the cracks
Then a fortuitous happenstance brought me a photograph that spoke volumes about Barry Seal’s career, and the people involved in the JFK assassination.
Seal left it to his wife, Debbie, now his widow. And despite the 7-man “clean-up crew” from the State Department that came down from Washington to her home and combed through all of Barry’s records in early 1995, it is still in her possession. The photo, which she considered a keepsake, remained untouched in her safe.
The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. It was taken in the nightclub of the Aristos Hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa.
At the time the photo was taken, the CIA’s covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips. Philips, AKA Maurice Bishop, reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.
The photo shows a group of ten men, wearing black suits and skinny ties, drinking around a table. They appear to be a mixed group of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types.
Identifying the men in the photo took months. And when I had, I realized that it is the only extant photograph of the members of the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty.”
A young (24-year old) Barry Seal is seated third from left. Seated to Seal’s right is former CIA chief Porter Goss. Front left, beside Goss, is the notorious Cuban “freedom fighter” Felix Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime in Cuba, later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.
Felix Rodriguez has long been known to be one of the CIA’s most vicious assassins. According to law enforcement authorities, he keeps Che Guevara’s hands in a jar atop his dresser.
On the other side of the table, the only celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft is covering his face with his sport coat. However, his swept-back “Big Wave in Hawaii” pompadour made him fairly easily identifiable as Frank Sturgis. Sturgis has often been mentioned in connection with the JFK assassination.
Sturgis will later become famous as one of the Watergate burglars.Beside him, front right, is a man well-known among Kennedy assassination researchers. William Seymour was the New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal). Researchers identify Seymour as the man said to have impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was out of the country.
It is certainly a well-connected group. Just the fact that the man who will become the biggest drug smuggler in American history had been consorting back in 1963 with a man whose job was recruiting pilots for the CIA makes allegations of CIA involvement in the drug trade far more than just another conspiracy theory.
So, if there had been a get-away plane flown out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination—and assuming there had been an authentic investigation into the assassination, which there was not—Barry Seal would have been high on the list when authorities told the police to call in the “usual suspects.”
But that puts the cart somewhat in front of the horse. Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane? The answer is yes.
Three men in suits at Redbird Airport
At about 1:00 P.M. that same afternoon, half an hour after the president was shot, neighbors who lived along the road that runs by the Redbird Airport, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Dallas, began calling the police. A small private plane, they reported, was behaving very strangely.
For an hour it had been revving its engines, not on the runway, as per usual, but parked at the end of the airstrip on a grassy area next to the fence. The noise was so loud it prevented nearby residents, glued to their TVs for the news about the terrible event downtown, from hearing.
The police, perhaps understandably, were too busy to check it out. The question became moot when shortly thereafter the plane took off.
An FBI file of March 10, 1967, describes statements made by Louis Gaudin, the government’s air traffic control specialist at Redbird airport, who recalled observing three men in business suits board a Comanche-type aircraft at about 2:00 P.M.
Thirty-seven years later, I tracked down Louis Gaudin in retirement in the tiny town of Long Branch, Texas. “I filed that report in ’67 for only one reason,” Gaudin told me. “Sometime in 1967 I received a visit from an Assistant District Attorney in (New Orleans District Attorney) Jim Garrison’s office.”
“He showed me pictures of four possible pilots involved in the incident that day. One was a weird-looking character with a funny-looking wig. Then, shortly thereafter I saw on the news that David Ferrie had committed suicide, said Gaudin.
“That’s when I smelled a rat.”
Redbird Airport (today Dallas Executive Airport) is a small airfield between Dallas and Fort Worth. But it wasn’t just any old airport.
“The FAA had its general aviation headquarters there, said Gaudin. “Howard Hughes had a huge old WWII hanger there, with heavy security. People from Wackenhut all over the place. And there were the Porter planes from General Harry Byrd’s outfit.”
General D. Harry Byrd’s links to the Kennedy assassination begin with the fact that he owned the building, the Texas School Book Depository, from which Kennedy was supposedly gunned down.
Then, too, he founded an aircraft company that became one of the largest U.S. defense contractors during the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), which also—and perhaps not coincidentally?—tested missiles at the Venice Airport in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.
“What had happened was this,” he continued. “I was an air traffic controller working in the tower at Redbird that day. When I came on shift at 2 PM, we received a bulletin to report any suspicious activity immediately to an FAA Security number. And we kept calling that number all afternoon, but got nothing but a busy signal. And then, after we heard they had caught the ‘lone gunman,’ I guess they called it, we stopped calling, and let the matter drop.”
From his perch atop the control tower, Mr. Gaudin, between handling twenty or thirty flights into and out of the airport an hour, had noticed something suspicious about three well-dressed men in business suits standing, along with several suitcase, beside a Comanche painted green-and-white.
So suspicious was he, Mr. Gaudin related, that when the plane took off on runway 17, he asked the pilot if he needed any assistance. The pilot said no. Gaudin asked which way the plane was heading. The pilot stated south.
Gaudin watched as the plane flew south for two miles, then made a hard left, and then flew north to Love Field.
The pilot had lied.
Suspicions aroused, Gaudin went over to the control tower’s receiver and listened as the plane made an approach and landed at Love Field, eight miles north of Redbird.
An hour later, the plane was back at Redbird. This time only two people were aboard. The third passenger—let’s call him the shooter–had been left at Love Field.
James Garrison, American hero
And that’s where the matter rested until Garrison’s investigator’s came calling.
Then, after Gaudin became alarmed at the death of a man whose picture he had just recently been shown, he called the FBI, and filed the report which, he said, became something of a burden to him for the rest of his life.
“There was no Freedom of Information Act back then,” he says today. “That’s what’s created some problems for me.”
This would be just a ‘suspicious sighting’ except for something that happened later, which clearly indicated to Gaudin that he was a witness to something he had no business seeing.
From the control tower, he says, he was too far away to be able to identify anyone who boarded the plane. But there was one person who could: Merrit Goble, who ran the fixed-wing operation, TexAir, at Redbird Field.
“Merrit and I were friends,” Gaudin relates. “So one day, after filing the FBI report, I went down to see if the FBI had been by to visit him as well. They hadn’t, he told me. So I asked him if he had anything, any gas receipts, any record of the fueling of the plane in question. And Merit acted very strangely. He told me, in effect, that it was none of my business. He said, ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’”
“I always thought that was strange: ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’ Because like I said, we were friends.”
Merrit Goble died last year, taking any secrets he possessed about the suspicious plane to his grave.
Means, Motive, Opportunity
Was Barry Seal at the controls of the plane that took off from Redbird Airport on November 22 1963? We’ll never know for sure. But lacking an eyewitness willing to come forward and enough of a survivalist to live to tell his tale, we base a “yes” answer on his association with—and proximity to—the major players whose names get bandied about in connection with the assassination.
The central thesis of most writers on the assassination is that the Kennedy assassination was the work of the Mafia, elements of the CIA, and right-wing Cuban exiles aligned with Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, all of whom were CIA-connected. Not to mention Lee Oswald, who had formed an alliance with the U.S. intelligence community as a young man in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie.
Barry Seal knew them all.
He was a known associate of the ‘usual suspects’: David Ferrie, Carlos Marcello, Guy Banister, and Grady Partin. He was a gunrunner to Cuba, and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. And his participation in Operation 40, the CIA’s assassination squad, the blackest of black ops, as attested by the photo taken in Mexico in January 1963.
About one longtime associate of Banister and Ferrie (Murray Kessler) who was busted with Barry in 1972, one DEA agent said, “He (Kessler) had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans; that’s how I figure he met Barry, who was known to have been involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.”
Moreover, Barry Seal was a spectacular pilot, one of the best alive.
I believe Seal flew that ‘getaway’ plane out of Dallas; and that during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors, his participation in the JFK hit remained his ‘ace in the hole’ for the rest of his life.
But where did the shooters come from? I’ll take that up tomorrow, in “The Camp in Lacombe.” As far as I know, I’m the only investigator in recent times who was able to locate—and visit—the site of the CIA’s secret camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.
What do the 9/11 attack and the Kennedy assassination cover-ups have in common?
Mis-direction. On 9/11, New York City was where most of the killing took place. It took maybe an hour. In Venice, Florida, where the key conspirators got together, they spent more than a year. Yet there’s been endless talk—leading absolutely nowhere—about thermite, about holograms, about Building 7. And its all hooey, or, to use the technical term, disinformation.
Why I’m so sure is because I was the only investigative reporter at the biggest 9/11 crime scene—Venice—that wasn’t reduced to rubble. And I was continually made aware that I didn’t belong—and wasn’t wanted—there.
The Kennedy assassination set the pattern. Debating the minutiae of Dallas—the ‘magic bullet theory,’ the changing parade route, the standing down of military intelligence, and dozens of other unexplained anomalies—has proven only that a conspiracy had indeed taken place.
But it was never going to put anyone in jail. Because the conspiracy was elsewhere. In New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, on No Name Key, and. most especially, in Lacombe, Louisiana, where the CIA kept a secret camp which trained assassins.
Moreover the conspirators were pros. The Kennedy assassination was their calling card. Unlike the “big find” about the identity of the second shooter which one prominent author is currently using to flog his book—who was told by a friend of a friend of a guy who had it on good authority that so-and-so, who’s now, regrettably, dead, was in on the hit— they didn’t disappear from history after November 23, 1963.
For the next several decades, the people who killed JFK made history. In Laos, and Cambodia, at the Watergate complex, and in the drug trafficking scandal that was mis-named Iran Contra.
They were people like Barry Seal.
30 responses to “Barry Seal, the CIA camp in Lacombe, & the JFK Assassination”
Also, that isn’t William Seymour sitting next to Frank that is one of Frank friends, and later co-conspirator in Watergate, that is Virgilio R. Gonzales that is sitting next to him… Lots of mistakes here.
And…. By the way Tosh Plumlee believes it is him in that photo covering his face, he also believes that photo was taken in Arizona, neither is true, that photo was taken at a Miami Cuban restaurant in 1964, that is in-fact Frank Sturgis covering his face, it isn’t Tosh.
There are way too many inconsistencies here, for example you say “Felix Rodriguez has long been known to be one of the CIA’s most vicious assassins. According to law enforcement authorities, he keeps Che Guevara’s hands in a jar atop his dresser.”
That’s not true, his hands were cut off yes, but because Fidel Castro would have denied that was Che’s body, so Felix asked that Che’s hands be mailed to Fidel Castro were they are in Cuba right now and still on display.
There are a lot of mistakes in this articular Way too many….
Daniel, the last time I wrote, you weren’t very hospitable. I’ll give you one more chance to put out the Welcome Wagon.
Thanks to your writing we all know about BS and Tosh being getaway pilots. I have no idea who was flying the little plane left idling noisily at Redbird. What I’m saying today is it would be next to impossible to figure out who of the Ass. team flew out Fri. or Sat. Reason being, not all the players were from out of town. Some went back to Miami, some stayed in D and some left because they had pervious commitmens. And, of course, some left “til the whole thing cooled down. Not all the players (ass. team) left en mass, or even close. There were no charter flights! I know….that’s obvious.
The person I talked about before was a significant player on Nov. 22. And what shoots down another reachers’ claim (reacher: Dankbaar) They were already living in D and did not ride in a carravan from Miami. But they did leave D via small plane. The pilot was using the name John Mertz. John and the grasssy knoll shooter flew out together. The shooter told me this personally.
This is what all this is about, and both JFK assissination and 9/11.. THE GREAT NEWS, THE SOLUTION IS MASSIVELY SIMPLE… https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10200666569810011&set=a.1043846299760.2008735.1333701295&type=1&theater
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I don’t buy all of George’s story below, but that’s another matter. another book to read is Terry Reed’s account of his dealings with Seal in the book, “Compromised.” This book hurt me, and I had also contact with a helio pilot code-named Pegasus who actually told Ollie Tenth Avenue North not to load a ice container of coke on his bird. North ordered him to “stand down” by the pilot kept the Flight Log and I’ve seen it..! BTW.., I’ve been a aircraft and helio inspector for the past 25 years and just back from FOB SHANK last years. At my age its seems those long forgotten memories are the easiest..(chuckle)..!!
Just got through again listening to Garrison’s audiobook, On the, “Trail of the Assassin.” I’m now 73 and had the good fortune to actually meet several of the characters from those days as I was “in” Special Operations” before any FM’s were written so that other could follow. I’ve got to reread your story flow, but did you know that Oswald, Seal, and Ferrie were all photographed together while in the CAP? The first person I ever met was a Huge McDonald who wrote the, “Hour of the Blue Fox”, and was the Lt on the Los Angeles Sheriffs’ Department who brought the Hughes 500C Helios in to service. He actually met one of the shooters and was the first to mention that at least three shots were heard on the open mike of a Dallas police motorcycle cop..!! Tons more over a beer at the FVW hall..(chuckle).., Slackman33, OUT..! (909) 556-0309
Barry Seal’s apparent piloting of a JFK assassin getaway plane points, again, to Bush Sr. and his cronies (the Biderman part of the DuPont family, Rockefellers, and more). For example, DuPont owned United Fruit company was all over the Bay of Pigs a(nd mafia laundering of money through Lansky’s Miami National Bank to Switzerland.. Many of the mob gofers in the JFK assassination were close to DuPonts’ United Fruit company. In 1963, Tampa based Santos Trafficante was the worst heroin strongman In places where Seal circulated, except for Bush Sr., Bush Sr, as readers know, was an actual psychopath who had been designated for a big narco role for two reasons: unfailing loyalty to DuPonts and Rockefellers (see Dr. Sue Arrigo’s CIA “child sex slave” account of David Rockefeller’s role in narco monies via Chase, fined for hundreds of millions of laundering during Reagan’s term). Bush Sr. also had Zapata drilling rigs in the Gulf, which are thought to have been a “clean” shipment point into the US, back then. Bush Sr. and Herbert Liedtke. also bought part of Pennzoil Corp. from Rockefellers. We clearly see the outlines of United Fruit complicity: JFK had ousted CIA head Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, yet we see that sneering, see-what-happens-to-you leer on Dulles’ face as he’s driven to his last official meeting with Kennedy and the new CIA chief, McCone, in an open air limo.
And Dulles was DuPont’s pet monster when Dulles, then head of Guatemala’s branch of (DuPont-owned) United Fruit, probably oversaw creation of the first CIA ops death squads in Guatemala in 1953 before the Arbenz coup there. Don’t forget Col. Fletcher Prouty’s story about how (Dulles protégé) Air Force/CIA general Ed Lansdale, who specialized in CIA shooter teams, is seen in photos up close and inspecting the “hobo” suspects as they were frog-marched through Dealey Plaza 1 1/2 hours after the JFK assassination. Bush Sr. is also apparently in a photo there, intently inspecting the flow of personnae. Yes, Bush was in Dallas that day, although he pretends not to remember where he was when JFK was shot!). So, DuPont fingerprints all over Dulles and the JFK assassination. At the time, DuPonts owned the major shares of GM, DuPont, Boeing, Phillips petroleum, Coca Cola, Remington Arms, United Fruit, and more. They essentially owned people in CIA like Dulles, hence DuPonts could easily have primarily originated the plan to shoot JFK, using Bush Sr. (a second tier gofer compared to DuPonts and Rockefellers). LBJ was merely one official possibly in on the murder (some say certainly, given re-appointment of Dulles to be on the Warren Commission). He wasn’t the prime mover.
DuPonts, Bush Sr., and cronies are familiar, usually mousy and unformed personae, cowardly, schlumpy rich boys, who reappear in Watergate and more. Karl Rove is one of their (allegedly election stealing) gutless, mousier-than-a-mouse operatives. We know who they are: the enemy of the people. Who wouldn’t grab a pitchfork to surround and ___them? As Daniel reported, even Laurance Rockefeller, that David Rockefeller brother whose photo processing company, Massachussetts based Aitek, reportedly helped to remove a few frames from the Zapruder film before it was seen publicly. Laurence was the Rockefeller brother who sponsored a (weak, intentionally diluted) attempt to do a report about official info on ufos circa Clinton’s term in office.. Why were Rockefellers acting as killer mafia moneymen (in on black budget secrecy) while also pretending to want to expose government secrets in such a vein? For most readers, that’s a mere parallel irony, but for me it’s clear, patterned indication of something worse. .
Do you see a pattern in Seal, Bush Sr. and Duponts/Rockefellers doings re JFK? The point being, when Seal was getting paid unusually large amounts to pilot planes on mob and CIA related flights in 1963, you can almost be sure that Bush Sr, whose name and phone number were in Barry Seal’s personal phone list when Seal was shot dead, was already either aware of or actually using pilot Barry Seal to move quantities of CIA related heroin. It didn’t begin with Air America in Vietnam. It was already going and the profits were an open secret (you didn’t have to be in the Skull and Bones/Russell Trust narco loop to know that, then).. J. Edgar was taking Marcello bribes (bags of cash) and trying to say, after the Appalachian conference of mob leaders, that there was no mafia.in the US. Bush Sr. certainly ran Seal and used the monies gained for criminal ops. So, how do we beat that?
Bush Sr. is now clearly senile, wheel-chaired and limping toward his death. He’s over with. David Rockefeller is 97 and is simply NOT competent. Which leaves who, in control of the rackets? Jeb Bush is round-faced psychopath who sponsored now-dead ex-Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch’s stay in Florida to prevent extradition to Venezuela for bombing in a jetliner. But Jeb is a wimp who never served in high office, just a narco-route governorship. He isn’t deep enough to manipulate federal government levers. So, with the last royally connected Rockefeller brother, David, now over with, and Bush Sr. no longer competent,. who runs those rackets? Privately, I suspect it has become a kind of naked singularity that’s considered too obvious. It may be “guided” by Goldman and some lingering DuPonts, although DuPonts ate big shit when GM went bankrupt. No one will fear them with the same (mousy, gofer) awe that gutless cabal operatives once felt for them (all of those assholes in that Mexican restaurant photo were guless, compared to a real stout), What I’m saying is that yes, the narco monies now flow, perhaps even into a Carlos Slim loan to the New York Times in 2009 and similar “mainstream” shill accounts, but the real center of criminal power is now in flux. If we simply, cleanly end the Federal Reserve bank and end the CIA Act of 1949, which allows CIA-related crime families to use other government agencies’ funds without respect to their intended use, we kill their power base.
Of course we must do that. It’s a struggle for control of the human future. All informed nations know who the enemy is among us. Again, the enemy is weak now, and we must act more decisively to further hobble them at this point in human history. Any literate researcher sees the outlines of dozens of epic debacles, any one of which would cause a public uprising, a major re-casting of US government. But the answer isn’t merely a taks for US citizens. The solution is in our ability to feel for and share such concerns with others across the globe regarding the threat among us.
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