[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

Bureau.” 427 The panel found nothing suspicious in the FBI’s interviews with Oswald
upon his return to the United States, its failure to prosecute him for any alleged espionage
offenses. The panel also did not consider whether Oswald was an official agent
provocateur of some kind in his double dealings with leftist radicals and right-wingers.
The congressional investigators focused on individuals, not institutions. They
found troubling signs that Oswald had relationships in New Orleans with rabid anti-
Castroite, private investigator David Ferrie, who worked for mob boss Carlos Marcello
and was one of the strangest figures related to the Kennedy assassination. There was
evidence Ferrie served as the captain of the young Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol unit. In the
summer of 1963, witnesses also told of seeing Ferrie and Oswald together. Witnesses
also placed Oswald together with another anti-Communist, right-wing figure -- former
FBI agent Guy Bannister. The cast of characters in New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim
Garrison and the House Committee’s investigations are similar, but they drew different
conclusions: Garrison ignored the mob and blamed the intelligence community; the
House committee focused on the mob instead of U.S. intelligence.
Blakey suggested that Garrison turned a blind eye to Ferrie’s mob connections
because the District Attorney may have had ties to the Marcello organization himself.
Garrison’s defenders said Blakey ignored evidence that U.S. intelligence was involved
and focused on the mob because he was a former Justice Department lawyer under
Robert Kennedy involved in prosecuting the Mafia. The problem, of course, was that
Ferrie and Bannister were connected to the mob, the intelligence community, and anti-
427 House Report, 246.
190