FROM: Ed Haslam, INTERNET:edhaslam@indirect.com TO: (unknown), INTERNET:JFK-CONSPIRACY@NETCOM.COM DATE: 9/10/95 2:17 AM Re: A Profile of INCA Founder: Dr. Ochsner Sender: owner-jfk-conspiracy@netcom.com Received: from netcom4.netcom.com by arl-img-3.compuserve.com (8.6.10/5.950515) id BAA15015; Sun, 10 Sep 1995 01:57:50 -0400 Received: by netcom4.netcom.com (8.6.12/Netcom) id WAA05146; Sat, 9 Sep 1995 22:29:53 -0700 Date: Sat, 9 Sep 1995 22:29:53 -0700 Message-Id: <199509100529.WAA05146@netcom4.netcom.com> To: jfk-conspiracy@netcom.com From: edhaslam@indirect.com (Ed Haslam) Subject: A Profile of INCA Founder: Dr. Ochsner Sender: owner-jfk-conspiracy@netcom.com Precedence: list Reply-To: jfk-conspiracy@netcom.com Hello JFK Friends, To celebrate Lisa's bold new venture (the jfk-conspiracy list server) I am putting an excerpt from MARY, FERRIE & THE MONKEY VIRUS on line. Here are six pages from the chapter... DR. O Who was Dr. Alton Ochsner? And what was the "Sensitive Position" he held for the U.S. government? (We pick up 1/2 way through the chapter.) The FBI maintained a file on Dr. Alton Ochsner which we now have access to through the Freedom of Information Act. It shows his long relationship with the U.S. military, the FBI and other U.S. government agencies. These records show that in 1941 Ochsner received an "excepted appointment" from the Civil Service Commission, and in 1946 he received a citation from the U.S. War Department recognizing the medical research he did for the government. In 1955 he became a consultant to the U.S. Army, and in 1957 he became a consultant to the U.S. Air Force. Later in 1957, the FBI cleared Ochsner for a "Sensitive Position" for the U.S. government, and J. Edgar Hoover personally approved him as an official contact for the Special Agent in Charge of the New Orleans FBI office, for whom Ochsner had already been performing discreet surgery at discounted rates. In October of 1959, after two years of working in a "Sensitive Position," presumably with the FBI, the FBI conducted yet another "Sensitive Position" investigation on Ochsner and forwarded their findings to an unnamed U.S. government agency. Several days later, on October 21, 1959, the FBI formally discontinued Ochsner's relationship with the FBI, freeing him up to accept an assignment from the other undisclosed agency. So what was happening in 1957 and 1959? What was this other agency? Why would they have needed the services of a doctor? And what did they need from this doctor that they could not get from the legions of other doctors already working for the U.S. government in one capacity or another? These are important questions for which we do not have answers yet. By the late 1950s Alton Ochsner was at the pinnacle of his prestige. His clinic had grown enormously and was at its third location. His portfolio of celebrity patients and his new hospital made his name a household word. His social status in New Orleans could not have been higher. He had been King of Carnival and had won numerous civic awards. In 1956 he stepped down as Tulane's Chief of Surgery, and then in 1961 Tulane's Board of Directors terminated his teaching position, citing a conflict of interest with his clinic as the reason. If nothing else, it helped distance Tulane from Ochsner's increasingly covert activities. He was sixty-five years old at the time. Having achieved considerable financial success during his career, the Tulane termination meant that Ochsner was now free to devote himself to his personal passion, politics. Basically, Ochsner was an arch-conservative with an antebellum anti-welfare mentality. A quick glimpse of his political philosophy can be seen in the following quote from a letter he wrote to U.S. Senator Allen Ellender: "I sincerely hope that the Civil Rights Bill can also be defeated, because if it were passed, it would certainly mean virtual dictatorship by the President and the Attorney General, a thing I am sure they both want." One of the major news events of 1959 was Castro's revolution in Cuba. It threatened to spread to all Latin America and to displace the near-free labor economic system which American business had profited upon for decades. Trade was New Orleans' biggest business, and seventy-five percent of it was with Latin America. The entire New Orleans business community was threatened by this revolutionary trend. The reactionary sentiment in New Orleans centered around civic organizations like International House and the International Trade Mart which promoted trade with Latin America. Ochsner himself was President of International House, and he joined International Trade Mart's Clay Shaw on the Board of Directors of the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans which brought CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell to New Orleans to discuss the Communist threat, a small favor for Congressman Hebert's district. Ochsner saw the situation clearly. With revolutionaries in the capitals of Latin America, the displaced elite would no longer be able to jump on jets and fly to New Orleans for medical treatment. The medical empire he built was threatened. Ochsner did something about it. He became a fanatical anti-Communist. In 1961, Ochsner institutionalized his anti-Communist crusade by founding an organization called INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. INCA's objective was to prevent Communist revolutions in Latin America by teaching the sordid truth about Communism to the Latin American masses. In brief, it was a right-wing propaganda mill, loosely modeled on Radio Free Europe. Ochsner served as INCA's President and Chairman. A typical INCA production interviewed Cuban exiles about the horrors of losing their sugar plantations or their mattress factories to Castro's forces. From these interviews, INCA produced and distributed audio tape recordings called "Truth Tapes" to 120 radio stations throughout Latin America. INCA's most ambitious project was a film about Castro called "Hitler in Havana." The New York Times reviewed the film, calling it "the crudest form of propaganda" and a "tasteless affront to minimum journalistic standards." In a perceptive article about INCA, archivist Arthur Carpenter described anti-Communism as an ideology of convenience which offered the ruling elite "a respectable way to discredit challenges to its power." But Ochsner's conviction was deeper than that. Once I had the opportunity to ask someone who knew him personally about his political views. The answer was, "He was like a fundamentalist preacher in the sense that the fight against Communism was the only subject that he would talk about, or even allow you to talk about, in his presence." Financing for INCA is said to have come from Ochsner personally and from other doctors and business people in the New Orleans area. Ochsner and INCA Executive Director Ed Butler enlisted as many New Orleans business and political leaders as possible in their cause. Sear's heirs Edgar/Edith Stern (WDSU) were members of INCA. Eustis Reily of the Reily Coffee Company personally donated thousands of dollars to INCA. Of all the names on the INCA letterhead, the most interesting one is INCA's "Chief of Security," Robert R. Rainold who was described as the "Past President of the National Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI." (One might wonder if Mr. Rainold was aware that the former head of the FBI's Chicago office lived in New Orleans or that the Reily Coffee Company was managed by an ex-FBI man.) In the spring of 1963 Ochsner was quoted in the newspaper as saying, "As a surgeon, I know that in an emergency, sometimes you are forced to do things quickly or the patient will die... We must spread the warning of the creeping sickness of Communism faster to Latin Americans, and to our own people, or Central and South America will be exposed to the same sickness as Cuba." Later that summer INCA members descended upon Lee Harvey Oswald, filming his pro-Castro leafleting for television and ambushing him during a live-radio broadcast with a newspaper clipping about his "defection" to the Soviet Union. The records of the Mexican consulate office in New Orleans show that when Oswald obtained his visa for his trip to Mexico, he was followed by William Gaudet, who is known to have worked for the CIA and who edited an anti-Communist newsletter which Ochsner financed. There is no doubt that INCA produced anti-Communist propoganda for Latin America, but one has to wonder what other activities they were involved in? Mary Sherman's murder happened the following summer, in July 1964. There is no mention of her in Ochsner's biography, nor of the grief or shock Ochsner must have personally felt over her tragic death. On July 22, 1964, however, the day after Mary Sherman's murder, Ochsner wrote a letter to his largest financial contributor saying "our Government, our schools, our press, and our churches have become infiltrated with Communism." It appears the communists must have forgotten to infiltrate "our hospitals." Ochsner's own biographers cautioned that once Ochsner got out of his field of medical expertise, he exhibited an amazing naivete and even said things that could be termed as "ridiculous." The problem seemed to be that he saw the rest of the world with the same clarity that he saw medicine. For example, he cited the lack of anti-war demonstrations on college campuses during the 1970-71 school year to be the result of INCA's influence. But none of this hindered Ochsner's ability to rub elbows in increasingly powerful and wealthy circles. During one visit to Central America as a guest of the Guatemalan government, he became friends with National Airline's Chairman Dudley Swim of Carmel, California. Swim offered Ochsner a seat on National's Board of Directors. There he became friends with National's largest stockholder, washing-machine baron Bud Maytag. Ochsner also sat on the Board of Directors of National Banks of Florida, courtesy of Edward W. Ball who managed the Alfred duPont Fund. It was in these circles that Ochsner met William Frawley, an arch-conservative California industrialist who headed Schick Electric and Technicolor. Frawley became INCA's largest financial contributor and put Ochsner on his Board of Directors. Among Frawley's political friends was Richard Nixon whom Frawley had helped in his early political career. In the 1960s, ex-Vice-President Richard Nixon called on Ochsner in New Orleans, supposedly to discuss his future political plans. Nixon joined Ochsner and newspaper editor George Healy for a private luncheon at the exclusive Boston Club across the street from Ochsner's INCA. While Nixon and Ochsner shared many political sentiments, they also shared some important medical experiences. The ill-fated polio vaccine which NIH released during Nixon's Vice Presidency (1953-61) killed one of Ochsner's grandsons and temporarily crippled his granddaughter. The publicity about the bad vaccine outraged the public and caused a political debacle, toppling the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and routing the leadership of NIH. As President (1969-72), Nixon promptly declared "War on Cancer," quadrupled the NCI budget, converted the Army's biological warfare center to an cancer research laboratory, and financed NIH's "Viral Cancer Program." Were these events somehow connected? Did Nixon discuss any of his plans for his War on Cancer with Ochsner, the former president of the American Cancer Society? Ochsner's second wife, whom he met at a party at Frawley's house, was even closer to Nixon than Ochsner was. Her first husband, an attorney from Los Angeles, was one of the people who helped launch Nixon's political career. When problems with her passport threatened to interfere with Mrs. Ochsner's honeymoon to Greece, she called the White House and asked to speak to "Dick" Nixon. Her problems with the State Department were promptly solved. This is the level of political support that Alton Ochsner was armed with when District Attorney Jim Garrison began his investigation into the murder of JFK. And when Garrison started looking into the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald, he discovered that INCA and Ochsner were close to those events. Garrison's original intention was to arrest "the whole gang down at INCA" and squeeze them until they talked. His staff, however, felt the strategy was too risky and might back-fire. Garrison compromised and arrested only Clay Shaw in the hope that Shaw's association with Oswald would be more tangible and could be proved more easily in a court of law. One has to wonder if Garrison was aware that Ochsner had been working in a "Sensitive Position" for the U.S. government. In May 1967, as Garrison turned up the heat in his JFK investigation in New Orleans, Ochsner feared his own arrest. In response, INCA's corporate records were air expressed to California where Butler put them "under lock and key." Butler was in California working for one of Frawley's companies. Frawley had financially contributed significant amounts of money to the early political efforts of Ronald Reagan who, as California governor, refused all of Garrison's extradition requests. Needless to say, Ochsner did not take Garrison's investigation lying down. He fought back in his own inimitable manner. First, he was very vocal about his opinion that Garrison's probe was unpatriotic because it eroded public confidence and threatened the stability of the American government. (How could arresting the President's assassins threaten the stability of the American government?) Secondly, Ochsner promoted the idea that Garrison was crazy. He even managed to get a copy of Garrison's military medical records. These showed that Garrison, a front-line pilot who flew behind enemy lines during the World War II invasion of Europe, had suffered from battle fatigue and was grounded temporarily due to mental exhaustion and received psychological counseling. As tenuous as it was, this could be used to show that Garrison had some form of psychological problem at some point in his life. It was all part of the "he-must-be-crazy" tactic. Ochsner sent the file to a friend who was the publisher of the Nashville Banner. But that was mild compared to what came next. Garrison was being assisted by New York attorney Mark Lane who wrote Rush to Judgement, the first book to question the conclusions of the Warren Commission. To discredit Garrison, Ochsner attacked Mark Lane, branding him an unscrupulous communist and "a professional propagandist of the lunatic left" who was trying to create distrust and cause the U.S. to "crumble from within." Further, Ochsner instructed Congressman F. Edward Hebert (Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee) to tell Congressman Willis (Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) to dig up "whatever information you can" on Mark Lane. Hebert sent Ochsner a report on Lane extracted from the confidential government files which cited various "communist fronts" with which Lane had been associated. Ochsner secured a questionable second report on Lane from an unknown source. The unsigned cover memo said its information was from "the files of the New York City Police, the FBI, and other security agencies" and claimed that Lane was "a sadist and masochist, charged on numerous occasions with sodomy." Armed with these materials and a photo of a man (supposed to be Lane) engaged in a sadomasochistic act with a prostitute, Ochsner personally campaigned against Lane and the District Attorney. Could these actions possibly explain why Dr. Alton Ochsner was occasionally referred to as a "right-wing crackpot?" Here we have seen some of the many sides of Dr. Alton Ochsner (1896-1981), an influential doctor who helped shape the American medical system we have today, a highly-respected citizen of New Orleans who participated in civic institutions and who=7F frequented elite social events, a businessman who promoted an enormously successful clinic and who sat on the boards of several large corporations, a crusader committed to fighting communism in Latin America, a behind-the-scene sponsor of Louisiana political figures, a patriot with a thirty-year history of classified assignments for the U.S. government, and, of course, Mary Sherman's boss. What was the "Sensitive Position" Dr. Alton Ochsner held for the U.S. government? And did it have anything to do with cancer research Dr. Mary Sherman was conducting? - END OF CHAPTER - Ed Haslam ------------------------------- MARY, FERRIE & THE MONKEY VIRUS The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory by Edward T. Haslam ISBN# 0-9643981-0-9=20 238 pages of text, photos, charts, appendices,=20 bibliography, soft cover, trade paper. TO ORDER BY MAIL, send $15.00 to: WORDSWORTH COMMUNICATIONS 7200 Montgomery #280 Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109 TO ORDER BY PHONE, call=20 1-800-MONKEY-X in the USA or Canada. That's 1-800-666-5399. All major credit cards accepted. All prices are US. Price includes shipping, US book rate. Overnight delivery available. * * * E N D * * *