Marita
Lorenz, the daughter of a German father and an American mother, was
born in Bremen, Germany, on 18th August,
1939. Lorenz visited Cuba in February, 1959.
Soon afterwards she began an affair with Fidel
Castro
and claims to have had his child. Later she was recruited by Frank
Sturgis
to work
for the Central
Intelligence Agency.
In January 1960, Lorenz took part in a failed attempt to poison Castro.
Lorenz fled to the United
States and joined the secret International Anti-Communist Brigade.
I n 1961 met Marcos Pérez Jímenez, the former President
of Venezuela. Later she gave birth to his daughter. In 1970, Lorenz
married the manager of an apartment building near the United
Nations. Soon afterwards the Federal Bureau
of Investigation recruited her to spy on Soviet diplomats.
In
November, 1977, Lorenz gave an interview to the New
York Daily News in which she claimed that a group called
Operation 40, that included Lee Harvey Oswald
and Frank
Sturgis,
were involved in a conspiracy to kill both John
F. Kennedy
and
Fidel
Castro.
Lorenz
also testified before the House
Select Committee on Assassinations where
she claimed that Sturgis had been one of the gunmen who fired on John
F. Kennedy
in Dallas. The committee dismissed her testimony,
as they were unable to find any other evidence to support it.
In August,
1978, Victor
Marchetti published
an article about the assassination of John
F. Kennedy in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight.
In the article Marchetti argued that the
House Special Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed E.
Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry
Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy.
Marchetti's article also included a story that Lorenz had provided
information on this plot. Later that month Joseph
Trento and
Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday
News Journal.
The
HSCA did not publish this CIA
memo linking its agents to the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and
in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby
appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that
Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction
as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the
case was retried. This time Mark Lane
defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action.
Lane eventually discovered
Marchetti’s sources. The main source was William
Corson. It also emerged that Marchetti had also consulted James
Angleton and Alan J. Weberman before
publishing the article. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions
from Lorenz, David Atlee Phillips, Richard
Helms, G.
Gordon Liddy and Stansfield Turner,
plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of E.
Howard Hunt,
the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty
of libel when he suggested that John
F. Kennedy had
been assassinated by people working for the CIA.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Debate on Operation 40
Debate on Marta Lorenz
Namebase: Marita Lorenz
(1)
Gaeton
Fonzi,
The Last Investigation (1993)
Despite the fact that she
was living in a luxury apartment when I first met her, Lorenz and
her fourteen-year-old daughter, the illegitimate child of former Venezuelan
President Marcos Pérez Jímenez, were collecting welfare
from the State of New York. (Lorenz had met the wealthy ex-dictator
in Miami in 1961, two years before he was arrested and deported to
Spain. "Marcos said he wanted to meet me because he knew I was
Fidel's girl," she told me. "He chased me and I finally
gave in." Years later, on the Geraldo TV show, she would claim
Jímenez was "an assignment" from the CIA.) In 1970,
Lorenz had married the manager of an apartment building near the United
Nations. Since many of the units were rented to members of the Soviet
and Soviet bloc UN delegations, the FBI recruited her husband as a
paid informant. According to his FBI contact, Marita herself volunteered,
going through the nightly trash in search of useful information. She
eventually split with her husband, remarried and then took up with
a Mob enforcer, who ensconced her in the upper East Side digs. Unfortunately,
after setting her up, her paramour was irregular in providing financial
support, probably due to the nature of his business. However, Marita
had managed to survive over the years by being a paid informant for
local and Federal police agencies, including the FBI, US Customs and
the DEA. For Marita Lorenz, life was lived on the edge.
(2) Paul Meskil, New York Daily News (3rd November, 1977)
Marita Lorenz told the
New York Daily News that her companions on the car trip from
Miami to Dallas were Oswald, CIA contact agent Frank Sturgis, Cuban
exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and
two Cuban brothers whose names she did not know.
She said that they were
members of Operation 40, a secret
guerrilla
group originally formed
by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion...
Ms. Lorenz described Operation
40 as an "assassination squad" consisting of about 30 anti-Castro
Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired
to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it
blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
She said Oswald... visited
an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The next
time she saw him, Ms. Lorenz said, was... in the Miami home of Orlando
Bosch, who is now in a Venezuelan prison on murder charges in connection
with the explosion and crash of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 persons
last year.
Ms. Lorenz claimed that
this meeting was attended by Sturgis, Oswald, Bosch and Diaz Lanz,
former Chief of the Cuban Air Force. She said the men spread Dallas
street maps on a table and studied them...
She said they left for
Dallas in two cars soon after the meeting. They took turns driving,
she said, and the 1,300-mile trip took about two days. She added that
they carried weapons - "rifles and scopes" - in the cars...
Sturgis reportedly recruited
Ms. Lorenz for the CIA in 1959 while she was living with Castro in
Havana. She later fled Cuba but returned on two secret missions. The
first was to steal papers from Castro's suite in the Havana Hilton;
the second mission was to kill him with a poison capsule, but it dissolved
while concealed in ajar of cold cream.
Informed of her story,
Sturgis told the News yesterday: "To the best of my knowledge,
I never met Oswald."
(3)
Victor
Marchetti, The Spotlight (14th
August, 1978)
A few months ago, in March, there was a meeting at CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., the plush home of America's super spooks
overlooking the Potomac River. It was attended by several high-level
clandestine officers and some former top officials of the agency.
The
topic of discussion was: What to do about recent revelations associating
President Kennedy's accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, with the
spy game played between the U.S. and the USSR? (Spotlight,
May 8, 1978.) A decision was made, and a course of action determined.
They were calculated to both fascinate and confuse the public by staging
a clever "limited hangout" when the House Special Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA) holds its open hearings, beginning later
this month.
A
"limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently
used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of
secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story
to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even
volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the
key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually
so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue
the matter further.
We
will probably never find out who masterminded the assassination of
JFK - or why. There are too many powerful special interests connected
with the conspiracy for the truth to come out even now, 15 years after
the murder.
But during the next two months, according to sensitive sources in
the CIA and on HSCA, we are going to learn much more about the crime.
The new disclosures will be sensational, but only superficially so.
A few of the lesser villains involved in the conspiracy and its subsequent
coverup will be identified for the first time - and allowed to twist
slowly in the wind on live network TV. Most of the others to be fingered
are already dead.
But
once again the good folks of middle America will be hoodwinked by
the government and its allies in the establishment news media. In
fact, we are being set up to witness yet another coverup, albeit a
sophisticated one, designed by the CIA with the assistance of the
FBI and the blessing of the Carter administration.
A
classic example of a limited hangout is how the CIA has handled and
manipulated the Church Committee's investigation of two years ago.
The committee learned nothing more about the assassinations of foreign
leaders, illicit drug programs, or the penetration of the news media
than the CIA allowed it to discover. And this is precisely what the
CIA is out to accomplish through HSCA with regard to JFK's murder.
Chief among those to be exposed by the new investigation will be E.
Howard Hunt, of Watergate fame. His luck has run out, and the CIA
has decided to sacrifice him to: protect its clandestine services.
The agency is furious with Hunt for having dragged it publicly into
the Nixon mess and for having blackmailed it after he was arrested.
Besides,
Hunt is vulnerable - an easy target as they say in the spy business.
His reputation and integrity have been destroyed. The death of his
wife, Dorothy, in a mysterious plane crash in Chicago still disturbs
many people, especially since there were rumors from informed sources
that she was about to leave him and perhaps even turn on him.
In addition it is well known that Hunt hated JFK and blamed him for
the Bay of Pigs disaster. And now, in recent months, his alibi for
his whereabouts on the day of the shooting has come unstuck.
In
the public hearings, the CIA will "admit" that Hunt was
involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The CIA may go so far
as to "admit" that there were three gunmen shooting at Kennedy.
The FBI, while publicly embracing the Warren Commission's "one
man acting alone" conclusion, has always privately known that
there were three gunmen. The conspiracy involved many more people
than the ones who actually fired at Kennedy, both agencies may now
admit.
A.J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, authors of Coup d'Etat in America,
published pictures of three apparent bums who were arrested at Dealy
Plaza just after President Kennedy's murder, but who were strangely
released without any record of the arrest having been made by the
Dallas police. One of the tramps the authors identified as Hunt. Another
was Frank Sturgis, a long time agent of Hunt's.
Hunt
immediately sued for millions of dollars in damages, claiming he could
prove that he had been in Washington D.C. that day-on duty at CIA.
It turned out, however, that this was not true. So, he said that he
had been on leave and doing household errands, including a shopping
trip to a grocery store in Chinatown.
Weberman
and Canfield investigated the new alibi and found that the grocery
store where Hunt claimed to be shopping never existed. At this point,
Hunt offered to drop his suit for a token payment of one dollar. But
the authors were determined to vindicate themselves, and they continued
to attack Hunt's alibi, ultimately completely shattering it.
Now,
the CIA moved to finger Hunt and tie him to the JFK assassination.
HSCA unexpectedly received an internal CIA memorandum a few weeks
ago that the agency just happened to stumble across in its old files.
It was dated 1966 and said in essence: Some day we will have to explain
Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963 - the day President
Kennedy was killed. Hunt is going to be hard put to explain this memo,
and other things, before the TV cameras at the HSCA hearings.
Hunt's
reputation as a strident fanatical anti-communist will count against
him. So will his long and close relationship with the anti-Castro
Cubans, as well as his penchant for clandestine dirty tricks and his
various capers while one of Nixon's plumbers. E. Howard Hunt will
be implicated in the conspiracy and he will not dare to speak out-the
CIA will see to that. In addition to Hunt and Sturgis, another former
CIA agent marked for exposure is Gerry Patrick Hemming, a hulk of
a man-six feet eight inches tall and weighing 260 pounds. Like Sturgis,
Hemming once worked for Castro as a CIA double agent, then later surfaced
with the anti-Castro Cubans in various attempts to rid Cuba of the
communist dictator. But there are two things in Hemming's past that
the CIA, manipulation HSCA, will be able to use to tie him to the
JFK assassination.
First,
Castro's former mistress, Marita Lorenz (now an anti-Castroite herself),
has identified Hemming, along with Oswald and others as being part
of the secret squad assigned to kill President Kennedy. And secondly,
Hemming was Oswald's Marine sergeant when he was stationed at CIA's
U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan-where Oswald supposedly was recruited as
a spy by the Soviets, or was being trained to be a double agent by
the CIA.
In
any event, Hemming's Cuban career and his connection with Oswald make
the Lorenz story difficult for him to deny, particularly since the
squad allegedly also included Hunt and Sturgis.
Who
else will be identified as having been part of the conspiracy and/or
coverup remains to be seen. But a disturbing pattern is already beginning
to emerge. All the villains have been previously disgraced in one
way or another. They all have "right wing" reputations.
Or they will have after the hearings.
(4)
Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (1991)
Howard Hunt, close associate
of David Atlee Phillips, with whom he worked in the both the CIA's
Guatemalan campaign of 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
Hunt would later be arrested for his role in the Watergate affair.
… In one of Hunt's libel suits, one Marita Lorenz gave sworn
testimony that Lee Harvey Oswald, American mercenaries Frank Sturgis
and Gerry Patrick Hemming, and Cuban exiles including Orlando Bosch,
Pedro Diaz Lanz, and the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol,
had met one November midnight in 1963 at the Miami home of Orlando
Bosch and had studied Dallas street maps. She also swore that she
and Sturgis were at that time in the employ of the CIA and that they
received payment from Howard Hunt under the name "Eduardo,"
… They arrived in Dallas on 21 November 1963, and stayed at a
motel, where the group met Howard Hunt. Hunt stayed for about forty-five
minutes and at one point handed an envelope of cash to Sturgis. About
an hour after Hunt left, Jack Ruby came to the door. Lorenz says that
this was the first time she had seen Ruby. By this time, she said,
it was early evening. In her testimony, Lorenz identified herself
and her fellow passengers as members of Operation Forty, the CIA-directed
assassination team formed in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs
invasion. She described her role as that of a "decoy."
(5) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)
In retrospect, one result of this whole soap-opera scenario (the Marita Lorenz story) – the factor that still feeds my suspicion of collusion – was a successful diversion, from the Schweiker probe through to the House Assassinations Committee, of our limited investigation resources. And, in the process, it injected a dose of slapstick that would impair any future attempt to conduct a serious investigation into the possible involvement of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in the Kennedy assassination.
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