“The five months that Oswald spent in New Orleans during the spring and summer of ’63 played a critical role in the assassination,” explains historian Michael L. Kurtz in the October issue of New Orleans Magazine.
“No one knows the reason for Lee’s decision to move to New Orleans in April 1963,” Kurtz writes. “Although his aunt, Lillian Claverie Murrett, and uncle, Charles ‘Dutz’ Murrett, lived there, his mother and brother lived in Fort Worth. The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, tread very lightly over the minefield of espionage and suspicion that encompassed Oswald’s five months in the Crescent City in the spring and summer of ’63. Eager to attribute a motive to Oswald’s alleged killing of Kennedy, the commission focused exclusively on Oswald’s public espousal of socialist, communist and Marxian ideology.”
“Three years after the 1964 publication of the Warren Report, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, Jim Garrison, would startle the nation by announcing (after the publication of a States-Item news article by Rosemary James and Jack Wardlaw), that his office was conducting an investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Garrison further stated that the assassination resulted from a conspiracy hatched in New Orleans in the summer of ’63, and that Lee Harvey Oswald projected a public image of sympathy for communism in Cuba and the Soviet Union, but beneath the surface associated with extreme right-wing elements taking actions to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. By early March ’67, the District Attorney’s office had arrested Clay L. Shaw and charged him with conspiracy to commit the murder of John F. Kennedy. A native of Kentwood, Shaw was a prominent member of the New Orleans business and civic community. He had served as director of the International Trade Mart and played a prominent role in the ’60s movement to revitalize the French Quarter.”
Kurtz is right about the importance of New Orleans in the JFK story, but some scholars of the case says he’s wrong on some facts.
What is certain is that the CIA had an active office in New Orleans both in 1963 when accused assassin Lee Oswald lived there and in 1967. Here is a CIA document identifying some of the personnel in the office.
As dramatized in Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” in 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought to prosecute local businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President Kennedy. There was little evidence to support Garrison’s charge and Shaw was acquitted.
At the time, the CIA claimed its New Orleans office had “professional contact” with Shaw but had “never remunerated him.”
But in 1992, J. Kenneth McDonald, a CIA historian, wrote a memo based on his review of CIA records, stating Shaw had been a “highly paid CIA contract source.” You can read McDonald’s memo here.
Independent scholar Max Holland said in an email that he later spoke with McDonald about the memo. “His recollection was that the memo was assembled from a couple of summaries that were prepared for him by the History Staff” of the CIA.
So CIA personnel reviewing CIA documents concluded that Shaw had been “highly-paid.” Others said he had never been paid. That’s not evidence Shaw was part of a JFK conspiracy, but it does indicate that Shaw had a closer relationship with the CIA than it ever admitted.