Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

188  Missing logs and production from the photobase LILYRIC



Related:
20   Fourteen minutes recording of Hoover – LBJ phonecall on 23-11-1963
183 Tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City


... the negatives may still exist ...

Cryptonym: LILYRIC
One of three photo surveillance sites under the LIEMPTY umbrella project, the only one of the three that
photographed license plates of all vehicles entering the compound. LILYRIC was a 3rd story apartment across
the street from the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, south of the LIMITED installation. The other two photo
sites were LIMITED and LICALLA.

(MaryFerrel.org)


Lopez-Report Map showing LILYRIC in relation to LIMITED and the Cuban Embassy in 1963.

LILYRIC provided the best vantage point for photos of visitors, as it was aimed at the Soviet embassy front gate.
We have no access to virtually any of these photos – as we will see, the negatives may still exist...Goodpasture
testified to the HSCA that LILYRIC photographs were destroyed for space considerations, but she believed that
the negatives were still in existence. A review of the Mexico City records indicates that the June-Dec 1963
LILYRIC photos were destroyed in 1967. A couple of LILYRIC photos from October 2, 1963 did survive,
apparently due to FOIA requests made promptly after the Act went into effect in 1967. It looks like Goodpasture
is correct - although the logs and contact prints from LILYRIC are “missing”, the negatives of the LILYRIC photos
appear to be on file with the CIA.

(Bill Simpich, State Secret, Chapter 4: Mexico City Intrigue – The World of Surveillance)

190  Defense department report on Oswald/Atsugi investigation


See also:
95   Richard Bullock's photos of Oswald
103 Many of Gordon McLendon's records

Inasmuch as Oswald was a marine, and the Marine Corps was a branch of the
U.S. Navy, a small Warren Commission omission is that it probably should have
taken the testimony of someone from ONI.

ONI came up when the HSCA investigated an allegation by a former Marine
navigator named Larry Huff that on December 14, 1963, he was on a flight with
ten to twelve military investigators that left the Kaneohe Bay base in Hawaii for
Tachikawa, Japan, the closest landing base to Atsugi, where Oswald was stationed.
Per Huff, the investigators went there to investigate Oswald’s stay at Atsugi. He
says he dropped the investigators off, returned to Hawaii, then went back to Japan
in the latter part of December to bring the investigators back to Hawaii. En route
back, Huff claims that the investigators showed him their report, which was classified
“Secret, for Marine Corps Eyes Only,” and the report’s conclusion was that
Oswald was incapable of committing the assassination alone. Although the HSCA
was able to confirm the flights from Kaneohe Bay to Tachikawa, the committee
could find no documentary support, or support of any other kind, for the mission
Huff claimed. Among those interviewed was Lieutenant General Carson A.
Roberts, who was in charge of the base at Kaneohe Bay at the time. He said he
knew of no military flights or investigations by military or civilian personnel connected
with the assassination of President Kennedy that emanated from his base.
Also, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Brewer of the Intelligence Division of Marine Corps
headquarters told the HSCA that his office conducted no such investigation, saying
it wouldn’t have even had jurisdiction to do so. And one Roy Elmquist of ONI
told the HSCA that the only investigative request his office received that had any
bearing on the assassination concerned the death of Martin Schrand, who served
at the Cubi Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines at the same time Oswald had
in 1958. ONI’s conclusion was that Schrand died an accidental death from a gunshot
wound while on guard duty.


Atsugi gate

Huff ’s story sounds fictitious on several grounds, the main one being that there
is absolutely no corroboration for it. If such a mission had taken place, all types of
documents would have been generated, and they were not. But there are other
problems with Huff ’s story. His wife, not Huff, contacted the HSCA about his
story, which he then reiterated. Also, George Moffitt, a military friend of Huff ’s
at El Toro Marine Base, said Huff, whom he liked, had a mental problem in the
past. (Huff had told the HSCA that Moffitt told him that a group of military investigators
had also left El Toro for Dallas to conduct an investigation, but Moffitt
told the HSCA he never told Huff any such thing.) Further, if the report Huff
claims he saw was classified “Secret,” why would the investigators let him, merely
the navigator of the plane, read it? Finally, the report’s conclusion from talking to
people at Atsugi that Oswald was “incapable” of committing the assassination alone
sounds ludicrous on its face, not being the type of conclusion that any responsible
investigative team would reach.

(Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, CD endnotes page 906/7)

192  Guy Banister's Files


related:
62     FBI Agent John L. Quigley's interrogation notes
123a  Fred Lee Crisman files
168   Six boxes of FBI files on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee


"The list of the index cards later were obtained by the District Attorney’s office and
provided insight into the interests of the occupants of 544 Camp Street."

During Oswald’s promenades with the pro-Castro signs and the Fair Play for Cuba and Hands Off Cuba leaflets,
placards with printing about Cuba were stacked in the rear of the Banister office. After Banister’s death in the
summer of 1964, his wife came down from Monroe, Louisiana, to remove his belongings from the office and
found some interesting mementos from Oswald’s scenes as a Communist. Among Banister’s effects there
remained a stock of Hands Off Cuba leaflets.


Guy Banister (1901-1964)

Banister always tended his files with careful husbandry, keeping them locked and retaining for himself the only
key. After his death, FBI agents appeared and carted off the files to the great national cemetery which the
government maintains for the burial of evidence. They knew where to go, they knew what they wanted, and
they were there within hours of Banister’s death.

Yet eight months earlier when they were investigating the assassination of the President, the government could
find nothing of interest there. The synopsis of the Secret Service report, file number CO-2-34,030, reads as
follows:

Extensive investigation conducted thus far has failed to establish that the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” has
offices at 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. It has likewise been impossible to find anyone who recalls ever
seeing Lee Harvey Oswald at this address.

Perhaps it all depends on which door the government used. After Banister’s death, when its agent entered the
side door at 531 Lafayette Street, they swept in like locusts. However, they overlooked the Hands Off Cuba
pamphlets and they overlooked the index cards to the files.

The list of the index cards later were obtained by the District Attorney’s office and provided insight into the
interests of the occupants of 544 Camp Street. Following are some of the Banister files, which the
government seized, as well as the classification numbers used by Banister:

            American Central Intelligence Agency 20-10

            Ammunition and Arms 32-1  

            Anti-Soviet Underground 25-1  

            B-70 Manned Bomber Force 15-16

            Civil Rights Program of J.F.K. 8-41

            Dismantling of Ballistic Missile System 15-16

            Dismantling of Defenses, U.S. 15-16

            Fair Play for Cuba Committee 23-7  

            International Trade Mart 23-14

            Italy, U.S. Bases Dismantled in General 
                    Assembly of the United Nations  15-16

            Latin America 23-1  

            Missile Bases Dismantled—Turkey and Italy  15-16

The former chief of the Chicago office of the FBI had a most unusual set of files for a private investigator. It is
therefore understandable that after Oswald’s initial arrest when giving out the pamphlets on August 9, 1963,
the 544 Camp address magically disappeared from his subsequent circulars.

(Jim Garrison, Heritage of Stone, 1970) 


The Newman building on the corner of Camp and Lafayette

In the eighties, the Butler-Banister-Oswald story came full circle. A young advertising employee named Ed
Haslam was assigned to go over to the revived offices of INCA in New Orleans. At the time William Casey was
fighting a not-so-secret war against communism in Central America. INCA was going to use a radio station
through the Voice of America to support that effort. Haslam's company was going to write ad copy for the
station. When he got there, Butler showed him around the place. One thing he showed him was the extant
files of Guy Banister. Gus Russo knew this story because Haslam revisited the office and Butler in the nineties
with him. This intriguing fact never made it into the ABC special. Somehow, the files of the man who handled
Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 came into the possession of the man who "exposed" him as a communist, first
locally, then to the US government, and then to the world. By not going into any of the above facets, ABC
served as a conduit for propaganda analyst Butler to revive his greatest psy-ops triumph.

(James DiEugenio, Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare, 2004)



Edward Asner as Banister in the movie JFK

William Guy Banister (March 7, 1901 – June 6, 1964) was an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
an Assistant Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, and a private investigator. After his death,
he gained notoriety from allegations made by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that he had been
involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

He was an avid anti-communist, alleged member of the Minutemen, the John Birch Society, Louisiana Committee
on Un-American Activities, and alleged publisher of the Louisiana Intelligence Digest. He also supported various
anti-Castrogroups in the New Orleans area: "Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front"; "Anti-Communist League
of the Caribbean"; "Friends of Democratic Cuba". According to the New Orleans States-Item newspaper, "Guy
[Banister] participated in every anti-Communist South and Central American revolution that came along, acting
as a key liaison man for the U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America.

(Wikipedia, retrieved 8-17-19)

194    David Ferrie's original statement to FBI


See also:
39 G. Wray Gill's November 1963 office phone bill
57 The Fenton Report
154 One library card
192 Guy Banister's Files

Within days of the Kennedy assassination, the FBI in New Orleans questioned David Ferrie, who denied any 
knowledge of the assassination. The FBI agents let him go, apparently unaware of Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol
connection to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or to New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. Neither 
apparently did the agents know that Ferrie had been working for detective Guy Bannister in the summer of 
1963.


Whatever information Ferrie gave the FBI will never be known, since the interview was classified and locked
away on orders of J. Edgar Hoover and in 1976, the National Archives reported that Ferrie's original statement
was missing from its collection of assassination documents.

(Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 174, 1989)