David Ferrie and Shadowy Evidence
Why discerning truth in primary documents is so difficult.
Make it stand out
All aboard the hot mess express!
New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, who was also Guy Banister’s primary accuser, alleged that Ferrie was involved in the training camps, and the dates roughly match up with both before and after the Bay of Pigs. An FBI Report on Garrison’s allegations can be found here. A witness in the document describes training the men in Louisiana to cut lumber in Guatemala. The Bay of Pigs invasion involved training men in Guatemala.
However, Garrison is not a neutral source. Garrison’s office’s tactics were at minimum a violation of suspects’ civil rights, and at worst a deliberate and calculated twisting of evidence to fit a self-aggrandizing agenda. Sources do not agree as to the validity of Garrison’s contributions to JFK research as a whole. I have noticed that he is either staunchly defended or lionized, or roundly condemned. This makes me suspect, due to personal experience, that charisma and spin were at play in the Garrison Commission.
Most researchers also do not take the FBI at its word in regards to the assassination, either. As I’ve noted many times previously in Season 1, the culture of Hoover’s FBI made agents fearful of embarassing the FBI. I mentioned in the episode that covering one’s ass is a common theme in primary documents. That said, Garrison found bits of evidence that proved useful over the years, and is given credit for bringing the idea that conspiracy was at play into public awareness.
Given what Dad remembers, I think it’s likely that Guy was involved in the Bay of Pigs in some capacity. However, the allegation that Guy was involved in the Guatemalan revolution in 1954 doesn’t pass the smell test.
One rumor that has made it into numerous books on the assassination, often presented as fact, is that Guy Banister and an organization with which he was reputedly involved, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, played a role in the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala. However, the CIA overthrow of Arbenz was launched on June 16, 1954, and completed within five days, while attorney Maurice Gatlin did not found the Anti-Communist League until September of that year. At that time, Guy Banister was still the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago FBI. He did not leave the FBI or Chicago until late December of that year. (Banister reportedly joined the Anti-Communist League when he subsequently became a client of Gatlin's in New Orleans.)
The lesson to learn here is to not take even primary documents at face value, and it makes every fact check an uphill slog through 60 years of documentation.
