Charles Watkins raised a question about Judyth Vary Baker. We've never discussed her before on the forum as far as I can find, but I did read her book "Me & Lee" when it first came out in 2011. Here's the email I sent to Rick at the time:
Apparently this has been part of the JFK assassination research scene for awhile, but I first became aware of it after seeing an article on
LewRockwell.com last weekend. A sidetrack from our Indo-European / SB studies, but I couldn't pass it up.
The story is that Judyth Vary Baker claims that she was Lee Harvey Oswald's girlfriend from May thru November 1963, while they were working together in a secret biological warfare lab in New Orleans. After the JFK assassination, Judyth was afraid of being murdered like Lee and so many other witnesses, she stayed silent until 1999, when she emerged to tell her story. She first talked to "60 Minutes", who decided not to air her story. Then she succeeded in appearing on an episode of "The Men who Killed Kennedy", that was briefly shown on the History Channel in 2003. Since then the has been quite controversial -- apparently many JFK researchers have rejected her story. One of her top supporters is Jim Fetzer, which is also a little disturbing.
During all this controversy, she has been promising to publish a book -- which has just recently come out via Trineday Books and Kris Millegan, our local Eugene-area publisher. It appears that Kris picked it up as sort of a companion piece to another book he published in 2007, "Dr. Mary's Monkey" by Edward T. Haslam, which is about Haslam's research on the cancer virus project.
Judyth Vary Baker's book is called "Me and Lee." I'm loving this book, partly because it's a great star-crossed love story to rival Romeo and Juliet, and partly because of her tale of how she stumbled into her brief career as a biological weapons researcher. I want to believe it because it's so rich, how could you make up stuff like this. Although she admits in the book that her own son doesn't believe it, and begged her to publish it as historical fiction.
She says she was a whiz kid in high school in Florida and was taken under the wing of various increasingly-prestigious local scientists, and began studying the use of viruses & radiation to induce cancer in mice. During her senior year, she hitchhiked her way to a medical conference and crashed it by using her high school press card, and wound up sharing her lab notebooks with the great Dr. Alton Ochsner. Ochsner subsequently visited Judyth's lab at the high school, bringing along with him the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harold Urey, and they told her she was doing some of the most advanced work in the country -- and then they shut down her lab for fear that her super-potent viruses would escape and cause an epidemic. The next summer she continued her research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
However, when Vary started into college, things quickly went awry. Rather than attending a top scientific university, she decided to attend a small Catholic college, St. Francis. Then, because of her religious faith and her desire to be of service in cancer research, she formulated plans to become a nun. Her father, horrified about this choice, pulled her out of school and essentially put her under house arrest to prevent such a dreadful fate. He gave her a copy of Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" and she abandoned her Catholicism, but that didn't help her feel any less resentful about her dad.
Clandestinely calling on her network of scientific connections, she escaped from her father's house by dead of night and got herself re-enrolled in college at University of Florida, back on the fast track. But this time, she wasn't buying into any Catholic ideas of morality, and promptly got herself knocked up by coed Robert Baker. She miscarried, but the entire situation was sufficiently stigmatizing, demoralizing and time-consuming, that she found herself broke, and called once again on Dr. Ochsner to bail her out.
This time, Dr. Ochsner sent Judyth to New Orleans, to work on a top-secret pet project of his. Ochsner was active as a political conservative and was personally acquainted with South American political figures such as Pinochet and Somoza, who came to his hospital as patients. So of course Ochsner was virulently anti-Castro, and (so the story goes) he had devised a scheme to kill Castro by infecting him with a cancer virus. The project was being supervised by a Dr. Mary Campbell, and was being staffed by David Ferrie and assisted by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Judyth arrived in New Orleans in April 1963, a few weeks before her assignment was ostensibly supposed to begin. Her backers strangely didn't give her any advance on her salary, but they did set her up with a room at the YWCA, where her roommates helped her to get a job at the Royal Castle, a hamburger joint that was also known as a New Orleans Mafia hangout. At that point, apparently Oswald was sent in advance to meet her.
Meanwhile, Judyth was planning to secretly elope with Robert Baker, but both their families were militantly opposed to the marriage, so Judyth and Robert were reduced to communicating by means of encrypted messages in the personals section of the newspaper. Oswald encountered Judyth at the post office, where she reading one of these encrypted messages. Then she dropped an envelope. Oswald picked it up and handed it to her. Judyth had been taking classes in Russian so as to be able to read scientific papers, and she was in the habit of speaking to potential suitors in Russian as an ice-breaker. Funny girl. She says "Thanks Comrade" to Oswald in Russian, and he replies "It's not good to speak Russian in New Orleans". But they continue speaking in Russian long enough to discover their mutual love of Dostoevsky and Pushkin. After that, Oswald shows he has not mastered the arts of fast seduction, as it takes him until July before they become lovers. (Meanwhile Robert Baker has been inattentive, and Judyth and Lee start to refer to him as the "Rat". In Judyth's world, you know what happens to Rats.)
Of course Oswald was convinced that Judyth was deeply embedded in the intelligence community, between the encrypted messages to Baker, the job at the White Castle, and the Russian education. Judyth protests in the book that this was all a coincidence and that she was sent to New Orleans as an innocent dupe. Of course I'm sure you'll believe her about that!! Anyhow, Oswald introduces Judyth to all his spooky friends, and the rest is history.
And then a couple of email questions from Rick, and my replies:
On Mar 12, 2011, at 9:40 PM, Rick Stanley wrote:
David Ferrie? Why would he be involved in all this? To fly the nefarious bugs around from place to place?
Both JVB and Haslam are pretty cautious about speculating for the reasons behind these events, leaving the reader to form their own conclusions. Ferrie is portrayed as a complex, brilliant yet tortured personality, with a Jesuit education and pretensions to join the priesthood, and not just because of the availability of young choir boys. In addition to his career as a pilot, Ferrie also had a long-standing interest in medical science: while a pilot for Eastern Airlines, he used his spare time to take courses in biochemistry from a medical correspondence school in Italy.
Ferrie got fired from his job at Eastern Airlines after an incident in which he got drunk and went joyriding at low altitude over New Orleans, while simultaneously molesting a young Civil Air Patrol cadet in mid-air. So by 1963 he needed an alternative career.
The effort to develop the anti-Castro carcinogenic virus is portrayed as a very clandestine, low-budget operation. On the one hand, it involved a collaboration with Dr. Ochsner and Dr. Sherman, who were among the most prestigious cancer specialists in the country; and it involved a very expensive linear particle accelerator that was located at the US Public Health Services Hospital in New Orleans. The existence of this accelerator was also top secret: Haslam assembles a variety of circumstantial evidence hinting at its nature and capabilities, while JVB was only dimly aware that there was an accelerator at Public Health Services. Haslam conjectures that the accelerator existed primarily for other research, perhaps directed at developing a vaccine for the SV40 virus, while the anti-Castro project operated at an even higher level of secrecy. Basically, the design of the project was that mice were injected with cancer virus, and then the mice were killed and the biggest tumors were extracted and sent to the accelerator where they were bombarded to produce mutations. These new viruses were then injected into more mice. Rinse and repeat. Ferrie's job was to house, kill & process the mice at his apartment, while Dr. Sherman took the "product" (tumor extracts) to the accelerator for bombardment. (In my last email I mentioned a Dr. Mary Campbell. Not Campbell, Sherman!! What was i thinking?? Sherman was brutally murdered in 1964, and Haslam argues that half of her body must have been incinerated in the accelerator before she was finished off with a knife wound to her heart, on the very day that the Warren Commission staff arrived in New Orleans.)
While the accelerator was obviously government funded, the anti-Castro aspect may have been funded as a private enterprise, or else through some off-book channel similar to Iran-Contra. It's not clear how Ferrie was paid, but it seems likely that he found himself in over his head scientifically as the project progressed, and JVB was brought in to handle the technical aspects of handling and processing the mice. JVB and LHO drew their paychecks from "cover jobs" at Reily Coffee Company while they worked on the cancer virus project.
Just what we need in this story, more Byzantine confusion. I'm not sure what to make of this. I guess it's possible, I think LHO was alone in NO, that he left Marina in Dallas, right? But I thought he spent most of his time there playing the Castro agitprop game.
Judyth had a pretty strong resemblance to Marina, and claims that she often wore Marina's clothes and went out in public with LHO speaking Russian, and everybody assumed she was Marina. Marina did come with LHO to New Orleans. One problem with the story is that Marina told the Warren Commission that LHO was always faithful and came home promptly from work, while Judyth claimed that Oswald was frequently sleeping with her in hotels towards the end.
According to Judyth, Oswald spent most of his time doing agitprop, and only occasionally helped out with the mice. Oswald's most important role was towards the end, when his job was to assist in smuggling the toxic virus so it could be administered to Castro. Oswald was supposed to take the virus into Mexico for a rendez-vous with agents there.
Judyth was an admirer of JFK and was very alarmed when she heard Ferrie hurling death threats in JFK's direction. She says she confronted Ferrie who reassured her that he really had nothing against JFK, and that he was only saying these things to cement his position with his anti-Castro Cuban friends. Judyth was told that Ferrie and Sherman were working hard on the anti-Castro virus in hopes that if they could get rid of Castro, perhaps the forces gathering against JFK could be mollified.
As time went on, Oswald became embroiled with the JFK assassination plotters because of his anti-Cuban connections, and was increasingly convinced that they were setting him up to be the patsy.
JVB says that LHO told her that CIA agent David Atlee Phillips was organizing the JFK operation.
