Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

237  Diplomatic pouch No. 4083


Related:
103  Many of Gordon McLendon's records
121  330 CIA Joannides records
186  Name of CIA officer running covert operations with David Phillips in '63
183 Tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City
232  Preparation materials and the memorandum on Dan Hardway’s interview with David Atlee Phillips


A diplomatic bag, also known as a diplomatic pouch, is a container with certain legal protections used for
carrying official correspondence or other items between a diplomatic mission and its home government or
other diplomatic, consular, or otherwise official entity. The physical concept of a "diplomatic bag" is flexible
and therefore can take many forms (e.g., a cardboard box, briefcase, duffel bag, large suitcase, crate or
even a shipping container).

(Wikipedia, retrieved 10-29-19)

On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering
action to counter the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FFCC) in
foreign countries. In New Orleans, on September 17,1963, Oswald applied
for, and received, a Mexican travel visa.^ On September 27 Oswald arrived
in Mexico City. On that day, and the following day, Oswald, or someone
impersonating him, may have visited the Cuban Consulate. On those same
days, the Mexico City CIA Station was testing an impulse camera in their
photo surveillance operation aimed at the door of the Cuban Consulate.
Sometime in late September Phillips left Mexico City on a temporary duty
assignment at CIA Headquarters." It is at this time that Phillips was promoted
to chief of anti-Castro operations in Mexico City - the Cuba desk. On October 1
the Mexico City Station sent 'Bulk materials" to Headquarters by an untraceable
transmittal manifest" in a diplomatic pouch* "to be held in registry until picked
up by Michael C. Choaden presently TDY (Temporary Duty, AH) HQS. The
HSCA was not able to find out what was in the pouch. On October 8,1963,
HQ sent a cable to JMWAVE advising them that Phillips would arrive there the
following day for a two day visit. So, in the fall of 1963, Kent was promoted
from JMWAVE to WH/CA in HQ, Joannides was promoted to Kent's old
position in JMWAVE, and Phillips was promoted to the Cuban desk in Mexico
City. 

^ interestingly enough, the person in line in front of Oswald to apply for a visa was
   William Gaudet, a known CIA agent. Gaudet claimed that this was merely a coincidence.
   HSCA Report, pp. 218-219.

*Diplomatic pouch No. 4083 referenced and named in Record No. 104-10500-10077,
  supra, n. 37.

ª "Michael C. Choaden" was David Atlee Phillips's registered CIA
pseudonym. Exhibit 1
   Bates Page Nos. 000114-000115.

(DECLARATION OF DAN L. HARDWAY, JEFFERSON MORLEY V. CIA, Filed 05/11/16)

239 Passengerlist for Continental Trailways bus No. 5133 (original & copy)


Related:
145 Henry McCluskey's letter to the Warren Commission
183 Tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City
230 Mexico City CIA station's surveillance photo's of Lee Harvey Oswald

Although the passenger list for Continental Trailways bus No. 5133, which allegedly carried Oswald to
Mexico City, is missing, the FBI managed to locate some of the travelers, including two Australian girls
who told of a conversation with a man who told them of his experience in the Marines and in Russia.

(Jim Marrs, Crossfire)



The Bureau was unable to determine where Oswald spent the evening of November
24, so they focused their attention on his method of travel from New Orleans
to Houston, where he was next seen in the early morning hours of November 26 on a
bus departing for Laredo. An early FBI report stated,

"THE ONLY TWO BUS LINES OPERATING OUT OF NEW ORLEANS
ARE GREYHOUND AND CONTINENTAL TRAILWAYS. A COMPLETE
SCHEDULE OF ALL BUSES OPERATED BY THESE COMPANIES
HAD BEEN SECURED AND SHOWS THAT THE ONLY BUSES HE
COULD HAVE TAKEN AFTER EI GHT AM SEPTEMBER TWENTYFIVE
AND REACHED NUEVO LAREDO IN TIME TO CATCH THE
TWO PM FLECHA ROJA BUS TO MEXICO CITY ON SEPTEMBER
TWENTY-SIX WOULD BE THE GREYHOUND BUS LEAVING NEW
ORLEANS AT TWO FORTY FIVE PM, SEPTEMBER TWENTY-FIVE
OR THE CONTINENTAL TRAILWAYS BUS LEAVING NEW ORLEANS

(John Armstrong, Harvey & Lee, p. 606)


How about a simple passenger list or record of ticket purchases which would include all passengers
regardless of baggage?

Well my friends, we will begin to see a pattern emerging related to all the Mexican sourced evidence.
Not only were originals taken but so were the file duplicates at the home office. The FBI likes to use the
term "borrowed."

We will also see how these early erroneous reports of Oswald associated with the Frontera bus line were
in fact created for that purpose after Mexican officials are somehow able to locate all these MASTER
records within a day of the assassination.

On March 19th and 24th we learn that the original and duplicate copy of the Sept 26-27th PASSENGER
MANIFEST/LIST (not the baggage list) had been borrowed by Mexican Investigators and not returned.

Again in April we learn that yet another confidential source tries to get these passenger lists FROM THE
MONTERREY Flecha Rojas terminal only to be informed they too were "picked up" "shortly after the
assassination."

As reports relating to Mexico poured into FBI HQ during March and April 1964 it appears as if any and all
evidence related to this trip and these specific buses are taken from their original source locations within
hours or "shortly after the assassination." One has to wonder how the Mexican authorities knew so quickly
where to look, and which documents needed "review and analysis."

(David Josephs, Mexico City, Part 3 – The Trip Down, Part 2)

241  Military Intelligence records on agents active providing supplemental security on 11-22-1963


See also:
82 James Powell's other 22-11-1963 Love Field/ Dealey Plaza photographs
83 James Powell's notes
84 The after-action reports of Edward J. Coyle

The committee did obtain evidence that military intelligence personnel may have identified themselves as
Secret Service agents or that they might have been misidentified as such. Robert E. Jones, a retired
Army lieutenant colonel who in 1963 was commanding officer of the military intelligence region that
encompassed Texas, told the committee that from 8 to 12 military intelligence personnel in plain-clothes
were assigned to Dallas to provide supplemental security for the President's visit. He indicated that these
agents had identification credentials and, if questioned, would most likely have stated that they were on
detail to the Secret Service. 

The committee sought to identify these agents so that they could be questioned. The Department of
Defense, however, reported that a search of its files showed "no records * * * indicating any Department
of Defense Protective Services in Dallas." The committee was unable to resolve the contradiction.

(HSCA Report excerpt on Col. Jones)

In 1960 Jones was assigned as an Infantry Unit Advisor to the Turkish Third Army. In 1961 at the
expiration of his overseas tour, he was selected to attend the US Army War College. After completing
the USAWC he was assigned to Special Warfare Directorate, Office of the Chief of Staff for Operations,
Department of the Army at the Pentagon 1962-1964, then to the Joints Chiefs of Staff J3, Pacific
Division actively engaged in planning and operations of the Vietnam Conflict.

(In Loving Remembrance, 1917 – 2007)


Information on Oswald apparently came from the 112th MIG's operations officers, Lt. Col. Robert E. Jones,
who was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Testifying to the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, Jones said the afternoon of the assassination he received a call from his agents in Dallas
advising that a man named A. J. Hidell had been arrested.

Jones said he began a search of his intelligence indexes and located a file on A. J. Hidell that cross-
referenced into one for Lee Harvey Oswald. He said he then contacted the FBI in both San Antonio and
Dallas with his information.


The belltower at Fort Sam Houston

However, nowhere in the vast documentation of Oswald's life did he ever actually use A.J. Hidell as an
alias—the exceptions being when he mail-ordered the rifle allegedly used to kill Kennedy and the pistol
allegedly used to kill Officer Tippit using the name Hidell and the use of the name Hidell on Fair Play for
Cuba literature.

This raises two possibilities. Either military intelligence had some independent knowledge of Oswald's
purchase of the weapons which took place long before he arrived in New Orleans (were they monitoring
his Dallas post office box?) or someone, perhaps even Oswald himself, informed the military of his
purchases.

The files on Hidell and Oswald gave detailed information about Oswald's trip to Russia as well as pro-
Castro activities in New Orleans. Jones said he had become aware of Oswald in the summer of 1963
when information had been passed along by the New Orleans Police Department regarding his arrest
there. He said the 112th MIG took an interest in Oswald as a possible counterintelligence threat.

The House committee, remarking on how quickly the military found files on Oswald, stated:

'This information suggested the existence of a military intelligence file on Oswald and raised the
possibility that he had intelligence associations of some kind."

The Warren Commission specifically asked to see any military files regarding Oswald but were never
shown the files mentioned by Jones or any others.

In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned of these files and requested them
from the military, they were told the files had been "destroyed routinely" in 1973.

(Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 2013 edition, p. 288-89)

243  Rose Cheramie's autopsy report


See also:
17   One mystery car chaser
19a The Pitzer Autopsy Report
212 The identity of the mystery Oxnard area caller

British investigative journalist, Chris Mills, writes that Rose's hospital records reveal she had suffered "a
deep punctate stellate wound above her right forehead." Mills states, "[T]his type of injury, according
to medical textbooks, often occurs as the result of a contact gunshot wound."

(...)

Most likely, an autopsy would have revealed a gunshot wound, and we are informed that an autopsy was
performed on Rose's body, but the report is now either missing or was somehow destroyed. (Most states,
by law, require an autopsy in the case of any suspicios or sudden death, but they're only required to keep
the records for a certain period of time, which varies from state to state.)

(H.P. Albarelli, A Secret Order, p. 118)


Melba Christine Marcades, better known as Rose Cheramie.

When an investigator working for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison attempted to locate Rose
Cherami in early 1967, he learned that she had been killed on Sept. 4, 1965, when a car ran over part of
her head near Big Sandy, Texas. The driver of the car, who reported the accident to the Texas Highway
Patrol after taking Rose to the hospital, claimed that the accident had been unavoidable because the
victim had been lying on the roadway with her head and the upper part of her body resting on the traffic
lane. Due to the unusual circumstances and the lack of prominent physical evidence, Officer J. A. Andrews
attempted to determine whether the driver and Rose had any relationship. He found no evidence of such
and although he was allegedly not completely satisfied that he had all the facts, he closed the case since
the victim's relatives did not pursue the matter. Left unanswered were how Rose Cherami ended up lying
on the highway, especially Texas highway 155, a "farm to market road." Had she been hitchhiking at 2 AM
when the accident occurred, one would have expected her to have been on either of the two larger U. S.
highways, 80 and 271, which parallel Texas highway 155.

(Gary Richard Schoener, A Legacy of Fear, Fair Play Magazine, May, 2000)



One of the most intriguing stories to come out of the assassination case involved a woman who claimed
to have worked for Ruby and who is on record as accurately predicting Kennedy's death.

On November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination, Louisiana State Police lieutenant Francis
Fruge journeyed to Eunice, Louisiana, to pick up a woman who had received minor abrasions when she
was thrown from a car. The woman appeared to be under the influence of some drug. She later was driven
to the State Hospital in Jackson, Louisiana. On the way she told Fruge that she had been traveling with
two men "who were Italians or resembled Italians" from Florida to Dallas. When Fruge asked her what she
planned to do in Dallas, the woman replied: "... number one, pick up some money, pick up [my] baby and
. . . kill Kennedy."

Thus began the strange saga of Melba Christine Marcades, better known as Rose Cheramie.

While at State Hospital, Cheramie told doctors there that Kennedy was to be killed in Dallas. She
appeared quite lucid and hospital records studied by the House Select Committee on Assassinations reflect
the woman was diagnosed as "without psychosis". However, because of her previous record of drug
addiction she may have a mild integrative and pleasure defect.

Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson

Dr. Victor Weiss told Committee investigators that Cheramie said she had worked for Jack Ruby and that
her knowledge of the assassination came from "word in the underworld."

The day of the assassination, Lieutenant Fruge immediately remembered the woman and her apparent
foreknowledge. He returned to State Hospital and took Cheramie into custody. During questioning she said
the two men were on their way from Florida to Dallas to kill Kennedy. She said she was to receive $8,000
for her part in this activity and was then to accompany the two men to Houston to complete a drug deal
and pick up her young son. She even gave Fruge the name of both a seaman and a ship that were
involved in the drug deal and Fruge was able to verify this information through U.S. Customs.

Fruge also was able to verify the woman's story by talking to a Louisiana lounge owner. The owner related
how two men and a woman had stopped at his lounge about November 20 and that the owner knew the
men to be two pimps who regularly transported prostitutes from Florida. He said the woman became
intoxicated and was taken outside after one of her companions "slapped her around."

Fruge said he soon contacted Dallas police captain Will Fritz, the man in charge of the assassination
investigation, believing that he had uncovered valuable information. However, after Fritz told him he
"wasn't interested," Fruge dropped his investigation.

(Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 2013 edition, p. 385/6)

The authors are firmly in the camp that Cherami was murdered.  They believe that she was shot on one
of these drug runs in 1965.  That the killer then ran her over to try and disguise her death as a matter
of hit and run.  That the man who eventually found her body on the road, Jerry Don Moore, did not
actually strike her.  (The investigating police officer did not think he did either.) Further, they show that
there was apparently something wrong with the hospital report on her death, i.e., the report says she
was DOA, yet this is provably false.  She was worked on in the ER room and then transferred to a
private room and survived for about eight hours in critical condition.

(Jim DiEugenio, review of Gathering Fallen Petals, 12 November 2016)