The Simkin Spectacle

[Jim DiEugenio]

"It is necessary to add one more important aspect to what happened at the trial. Before and during the trial, Garrison's witnesses were being surveilled, harassed and physically attacked. For instance, Richard Case Nagell had a grenade thrown at him from a speeding car in New York. Nagell brought the remains of the grenade to Garrison and told him he did not think it wise for him to testify at Shaw's trial.[i] Even though Garrison had spirited Clyde Johnson out of town, and very few people knew where he was, he was brutally beaten on the eve of the trial and hospitalized.[ii] As we shall see, Aloysius Habighorst, the man who booked Shaw, was rammed by a truck the day before he testified. After he testified, Edwin McGehee found a prowler on his front lawn. He called the marshall, and the man was arrested. At the station, the man asked to make one phone call. The call he made was to the International Trade Mart.[iii] After he testified, Reeves Morgan had the windows shot out of his truck.[iv] What makes all this violent witness intimidation more startling is what Robert Tanenbaum stated to the author is an interview for Probe Magazine. He said that he had seen a set of documents which originated in the office of Richard Helms. They revealed that the CIA was monitoring and harassing Garrison's witnesses. As Tanenbaum stated it, he had a negative view of Garrison up until the time he became Deputy Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Then he read "all this material that had come out of Helms' office, that in fact what Garrison had said was true. They were harassing his witnesses, they were intimidating his witnesses. The documents exist. Where they are now, God only knows"[v]"

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[i] Russell, p. 436.

[ii] Davy, p. 310; Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 301.

[iii] Author's 1994 interview with McGehee in Jackson.

[iv] Davy, p. 301.

[v] Probe, Vol. 3 No. 5, p. 25.