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June 13, 2020 - Jim Fetzer
10:20
Judyth Vary Baker and Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans (Part 3 of 6)
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This is Jim Fetzer with my special guest Judith Vary-Baker on James Fetzer News, and we're talking about her relationship with Lee Oswald, which a statistician has calculated that there were so many incidents involving the two of them that the improbability of them happening merely by chance was on the order of one in a million.
Judith, would you like to add further to your discussion about Lee?
Well, in talking about those probabilities, for example, Lee Oswald was arrested on August 9th for passing out material, hands-off Cuba.
Interestingly, he held some back, about six inches worth, about 500 of them, about half of them, because he didn't want all of them to be confiscated by the police.
So I had them, and I noticed that some of them needed trimming.
If you look at the hands-off cubicle ones they show, you'll see there's more space at the top than there is at the bottom when they're printed.
And I'm a precision person, see?
So I was trimming off the tops of some of these.
I love it!
Yeah, that yellow paper, different colors paper, landed in the Riley paper, waste paper basket.
A couple and crushed them up.
So here I go and take these brochures, these extra ones that Lee was afraid to get arrested.
So he didn't want them confiscated because he had two demonstrations to make.
He had another one that was going to be at the trademark.
And it was all set up in advance.
So I go and deliver these at lunchtime, at my Riley's lunchtime.
You know, I take a little bit of late lunch, deliver them over to, his name is Dean Andrews.
He's that big, fat, jovial fellow you've seen in the film JFK.
Yes.
And he was, he was about to die in the heat.
He was sweating like a pig, you know.
Oh, he was so hot, but he just wanted to see what was going on so much, you know.
So I gave it to him, he put it right away in his suit, his briefcase, you know.
And he said, are you his girlfriend?
And I said, well, he's married.
He gave that material to Carlos Quiroga.
Carlos is a neat dresser and all that.
We had problems.
We didn't know whether we could trust him or not because his dad was in jail in Cuba.
with Castro and his mom was still there.
So if he's doing anti-Castro stuff there, they might hurt his parents.
He had a motive to be anti-Castro, but what if he's a spy, see?
So we had a real problem.
And when Garrison, I think it was, gave him his polygraph test, he flunked a whole bunch of things, like you said he didn't know Lee Oswald or Turnov he did and so on and so forth.
It's all, you can read it, it's really interesting. - Who was flunking the lie detector test? - Carlos Carroga.
Yeah, okay.
For example, he flunked it when he said that he had tried to infiltrate Lee Oswald's organization.
He flunked that question.
He didn't try to infiltrate it.
He knew all about it already.
There are other things that he knew about Lee that he flunked on that.
I would like to have that sometime get on record.
I have those.
I have that.
Most people haven't seen it.
So anyway, we have Carlos going to Lee's place with a big stack of flyers.
These flyers, you know.
But I had been seen handing them off by the very secretary they hired to take my place.
And as I said, they had an ad out the day that Lee was fired on July 19th.
On the 20th, out comes this ad to replace me because I was no longer needed to watch over Lee.
And make sure his record stayed straight, that he could go out and work with Bannister, he could go out and do this and that, come back, and we kept saying he was working 40 hours.
And we were not the only ones.
We have a record, you know, at the Texas School Book Depository, the day that he was arrested, that says he worked all day long when he was arrested at what, at 1.30 or whatever?
Yeah, 1.30, 1.40, right in there, yeah.
Well, that's not what his work record says.
It says he was there till all eight hours, okay?
So he was doing the same thing at the Texas School Book Depository that he did at Riley.
The rest report, yes, is timed 1.40 p.m.
And states, rather astonishingly, Judith, this man shot and killed President John F. Kennedy and wounded Governor John Connolly, and they hadn't even conducted an investigation!
Yeah, it's oh so pitiful.
And especially that, you mentioned how I feel, because I know that Lee Oswald did his best to try to save the President.
That's why he infiltrated these groups.
And they lured him in because they wanted to use him.
So, he gave his life for this.
Well, you know, Waggoner Carr, the Attorney General of Texas, conducted his own investigation and discovered almost immediately that Lee was working as an informant for the FBI.
Had the informant number 179, he was being paid $200 a month right up to the time of the assassination.
Yes, he was being paid $400.
We paid by CIA funds apparently for $200 and he was getting $200 a month, we think, from the FBI because he gave me $400.
My whole family knows I received $400 very mysteriously.
He gave it so that I would be able to reach him in Mexico if he got out.
got out of there alive, you know, we were going to get married and everything.
When Lee was a young man, of course, his favorite radio show was I Led Three Lives with Herb Philbrick.
I used to listen to that show myself, Judith.
How many lives do you think Lee was living?
More than one.
I remember when he told me fairly early on, he said, thank God I know my real name.
He said he didn't know how many people did.
He said, by the grace of God, that's what he said.
By the grace of God, I know my own name. - Yeah.
He said he was borrowed by the CIA from another organization.
Which I suspect was the Office of Naval Intelligence, ONI.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It really does.
You know, I wanted also to say that some people have been saying, well, she has no evidence.
It's incredible that people would say this when I've also brought in new information and new evidence.
I'm the one that said that Lee Oswald had, for example, connections with customs.
Now I have other researchers after they were told that they went and found them and they never said, Hey, Baker told us this.
No, they don't say a word.
You know, nobody mentioned this at all until I spoke up about it.
But the outstanding connection that he made really is with a person called Charles Thomas.
And when we talk about John Delane Williams, he actually worked with the granddaughter of Charles Thomas to get this information from New Orleans.
And she was willing to help him and work with him to get a lot of this information because she knew her grandfather was involved.
When I first talked to her, I knew that Charles Thomas was married to a Chitimacha Indian, that he had been coming from Miami, that before that he was a customs agent up at the border.
Now, when Lee Oswald was in New York, that's when he saw I Led Three Lives, and he really got into his head that he wanted to become a double agent.
He started talking about communism and all that, see how it felt to, you know, he's trying it out, see how it felt on people.
He started reading some of that stuff, but he really didn't get really involved until about when he was in the Civil Air Patrol when he returned to New Orleans.
Was it originally a movie?
Is that what he saw?
He had seen five episodes of it in New York, maybe more.
The reason I know that many is because he described some of them to me and I found them.
On television?
On television, yeah, of course.
He said, one episode he saw, and I don't know whether he saw it in Texas or where, but one episode he did see after that was where his wife finally found out, because he kept it from his wife for a long time, and he shows up kissing passionately, and he said, wow, I want my wife to feel that.
It was a very passionate kiss for the time, you know, back in the 50s.
Yes, yes, yes.
Things were a lot milder in those days.
Yeah.
So that really set him on fire.
And he has always, Lee always loved, the girls loved him and he loved the girls.
He had a lot of girlfriends.
I had a lot of boyfriends.
So, I mean, you know, we're both of us like people.
It's not anything like it's been put out about being quiet.
He was quiet with the right people.
He had to be quiet with the right people.
He seems to have been a very sophisticated fellow.
And yet the images we have from Dallas after his arrest don't convey the same impression.
How can this man have learned Russian in a very short time?
Lee Oswald had a slight reading disability.
It had nothing to do with his intelligence, but it really worried him.
He didn't like to go to school because he'd get embarrassed.
He would misread a word and the kids would laugh at him or something like that.
For example, once in New Orleans, we were at Redburn Gyms.
It's a long story, but anyway, we were writing.
We were printing out New Orleans on souvenirs.
And to make a long story short, anyway, he wrote when Orleans instead of New Orleans to give you an idea of his problem.
So anyway, he loved reading so much he overcame that disability, but he learned he had an ear problem.
He couldn't hear very well out of one ear.
That's the one he had, his mastoidectomy.
And because of that, he had to listen very well.
And that listening ability is why he was able to learn Russian so well.
Ah, fascinating.
Judith, this is wonderful.
I look forward to having more conversations with you and learning more about your life in New Orleans and Lee and others with whom you were associating.
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