Kerry Thornley’s FBI Files

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by Adam Gorightly

Aside from David Ferrie, there was no other among Jim Garrison’s sordid cast of suspects more colorful than Kerry Wendell Thornley, who not only co-founded the spoof religion Discordianism in 1958, but was also writing a novel, The Idle Warriors, based on Lee Harvey Oswald three years before JFK’s assassination. Garrison claimed that The Idle Warriors—as well as Thornley’s non-fiction work, Oswald—were attempts to set up his old Marine Corps pal prior to the assassination. If that wasn’t enough, Garrison claimed that Thornley was a CIA agent who impersonated Oswald and had an affair with his wife Marina. Thornley denied these accusations, although in the years to follow he grew to suspect that he’d been used as an unwitting participant in the assassination, manipulated in a manner similar to Oswald.

On the fateful day of November 22nd, 1963, Thornley was waiting tables at Arnaud’s Restaurant in the New Orleans French Quarter. As he later recalled:
Lunch hour was just ending as the news of Kennedy’s death came through. Not long after a waiter who had been outside—most of us were confined to the job and we did not have a radio—came in with the report that the police had picked up a suspect in the assassination. The waiter couldn’t remember the name, but this suspect was a former United States Marine who had gone to Russia for a couple of years.

Now it happened that when I was in the Marine Corps I knew a man who had, upon discharge, attempted to defect to the Soviet Union. He was sort of a Sad Sack type who was always in trouble with the brass and who, even when he tried, never seemed able to do anything right—except talk. He was a perpetual private by the name of Lee Oswald.
When I guessed the suspect’s name, much hell broke loose among the serving personnel of that Quarter restaurant. Some even went so far as to ask me if I was sure I didn’t have a hand in the assassination… 1

While it was Thornley’s prior association with Oswald that first brought him to the attention of the Feds, his behavior on the evening of the assassination also raised eyebrows when he and his pal Carlos Castillo showed up at the Bourbon House Restaurant bar and made tongue-in-cheek toasts to the Marine Corps drill instructor who had taught Oswald to shoot his rifle.

Thornley’s irreverent (and what most would consider distasteful) post-assassination humor could be attributed to his political stance at the time. Unlike many Americans who saw the slain President as a beloved figure brought down in his prime, Thornley held JFK in contempt for his support of the UN sponsored Katanga massacre. Thornley later regretted his behavior following Kennedy’s assassination, which alienated him from many of his French Quarter friends who took offence at his provocative antics.

On the evening following the assassination, Thornley received visits by both FBI and Secret Service agents, who questioned him about his past association with Oswald. Over the course of the next couple of days he began to suspect he was under surveillance. As Thornley recalled in a piece entitled “Oswald and I—and the FBI”:

“It may have been my imagination. But it seemed that in every public gathering place I went with my newspaper, there was at least one man in a suit with the corner of one eye aimed in my direction.

“I resented being under suspicion—though, certainly, I could understand it. Had not Oswald’s defection to Russia inspired me to write a novel, which I started in 1959, in which the main character was modeled in his image? Upon receiving news of Lee’s return to the States had I not told a number of people that I would like to go visit him in Fort Worth sometime? And worse, had I not traveled from New Orleans to California by way of Dallas within about a week of when Oswald left Dallas for New Orleans? And, as if this were not enough, I had to go and return to New Orleans in late August and early September by way of Mexico City! After which Oswald, a few weeks later, left New Orleans for Mexico City—then returned to Dallas and, allegedly, wound up shooting the President.

“I decided the only rational thing to do was go to the FBI and volunteer for a lie detector test, after which I would offer to cooperate fully in bringing the framers and killers of hapless little Lee to justice…

“I stepped into the night and headed uptown, out of the Quarter and along Rampart Street toward the Federal Building up near the train station. Getting in to see the FBI at this unlikely hour looked difficult. So I told the security guard to tell them I had something more to say about Oswald. Additional information. I was admitted.

“The man who ended up interviewing me after the initial confusion was an authentic police type. The kind who plays the Commissioner in movies. Greying hair. Irish mug. Hardboiled manner. Cigar. He looked bored. He put his feet up on his desk and sneered at me.

“I began to explain the real reason I was there, and he wanted to know if I’d had my picture taken yet. I hadn’t. So we went out in the hall and they took my picture.

“We returned to the office and, again, I started my explanation. For I wanted my motivation clear. Oswald was once a close acquaintance, and I had sort of liked him. Besides, he would have bungled anything so complicated as a political assassination for sure. He was not the cold-blooded psychopath the pandering press was making him out to be. Although my political outlook precluded my having much sympathy for the late President, it did not dim my eagerness to see whomever had used Oswald as a tool—be he Bircher, Red, or whatever else—prosecuted to the hilt. Just as I was on the verge of volunteering my help, my friend the Commissioner interrupted to inform me that the FBI was not interested in my political opinions. They were not Thought Police, he assured, missing the whole point.

“I tried a few more times. I don’t recall the exact sequence, but once I was asked if Oswald was “a homo of any kind” and another time I was interrupted with a list of names. Were any of them familiar? Nope.

“Another thing that happened during this interview was that a line containing what must have been half the FBI agents in New Orleans filed past the open door of the office, as if they were coming in at quitting time to punch out.

“Either I wasn’t such a hot suspect after all or these Feds had lousy security, risking compromise of all those men…

“The Commissioner yawned. If I thought of anything more please give him a call. His name was—oddly—Kennedy.

“That an FBI man named Kennedy should be working on the Kennedy assassination served to remind me that genuine coincidence is possible. As did an article in the paper drawing parallels between the death of Lincoln and that of Kennedy. And, meanwhile, reports were that a pile of evidence was accumulating to prove the lone assassin theory. It looked like I was wrong about Oswald. Perhaps I, too, in my own way, had succumbed to the post-assassination hysteria I found so ugly in others.

“While I was reluctantly giving up my conspiracy suspicions I was also readjusting my personal life to the fact that the assassination had happened and that Oswald had, somehow or other, been involved. Since April of 1963 I had been laboring sporadically at a rewrite of The Idle Warriors, my novel inspired by Lee’s attempted defection, and it now seemed a good time to buckle down and produce a finished manuscript. For this I knew I’d have to get away from the distractions of French Quarter life… 2

In December 1963, Thornley relocated to Arlington, Virginia. His motivation for the move was to be in close proximity to Washington, D.C. to increase the likelihood of appearing before the Warren Commission. To this end, Kerry figured if he could finagle an appearance before the President’s Commission it would be good publicity to promote his novel-in the-works The Idle Warriors.

“I ended up working as a doorman in a high-rise apartment near Alexandria, Virginia. I lived in the apartment and wrote. It was a cloistered existence there and I filled up page after page.
“One night a man named Smith called. He had heard of me through someone I’d spoken to briefly one night during one of my few beer drinking expeditions into Washington.
“He dropped by, and I believe the name under which he introduced himself was Winston Smith. He was a lawyer in the District, a friend was writing a play, and he had some questions on Oswald—the same, it turned out, that the Secret Service and FBI had asked.
“It occurred to me later that this timid, self-conscious little fellow might have been from the CIA—and that Winston Smith, if that was it, might have been a name he had just pulled out of the air—or his subconscious. For Winston Smith was the name of the hero in 1984, which was Oswald’s favorite book!
“The next phone call was from (Albert) Jenner, an attorney for the Warren Commission. He wanted to know if I would come by and give a deposition. I told him I would. He asked me to bring my writings about Oswald. A few days later I got a letter from Rankin (Chief Counsel of the Warren Commission) confirming the call.
“It was a bright spring morning when I entered the VFW building behind the Supreme Court and took the elevator up to where the offices of the President’s Commission were inconspicuously located. I was early. A janitor invited me to take a seat in the hall near the open door of Rankin’s office…
“After awhile the elevator opened and an old man with a pipe came hobbling out. Allen Dulles looked around, made a few funny cracks to a couple of secretaries in the main office—the doors of which also opened onto the hall near where I sat—and shuffled away, sucking loudly on his pipe.
“Next Jenner arrived and introduced himself and his assistant, John Ely. The three of us, together with a court reporter, retired to a conference room at the hall’s end with “President’s Commission” inscribed on the door.
“Jenner was a cool guy. I liked him at once. He was precise and sharp in both appearance and manner. One of those unusual government appointees who is genuinely interested in life, if not in his work. Who has humor in his eyes. My interview with him is on record. We went off record, I think, only once—when he informed me that his wife’s brother lived near my home town.
“Ely, the Associate Counsel, was called out of the room during the early part of the deposition and never came back…
“I inquired about some of my old Marine Corps buddies that Jenner had interviewed. I also asked his opinion on the foreign press and its skepticism of the lone assassin theory. He expressed mild irritation with the critics of the Commission, especially with those who said the report was going to be a cover-up.
“The next afternoon I came by to correct the transcript of the proceedings. I was told that I could change anything I wanted in order to clarify the intent of my words. I sat on one side of a table and struck out the hemming and hawing in my speeches and Jenner sat across from me working on his. As we worked I wondered aloud how the Secret Service had managed to find me for questioning so soon after the assassination.
“Jenner grinned and left the room. He returned soon with what I guessed was my FBI folder. He turned through it and withdrew a half-page report, which he quoted. It seemed that I had aroused suspicion by dropping a couple of comments about Oswald and someone had called the Feds.
“After introducing me to that FBI report Jenner was called out of the room. He came back to tell me he had to go pick Mrs. Jenner up over by the Supreme Court parking lot and that he would be gone for about 15 minutes. I was left alone in the room with what was apparently my entire FBI file on the table in front of me. I overcame the temptation to pick it up and leaf through it.
“Later someone in the business told me this was an old interrogation trick, to see if I was worried enough about what they might have on me to pick up the file and look. If it was, I was probably under covert observation…

In the mid-seventies, Thornley grew to suspect that he—as well as Oswald—had been victims of MK-ULTRA experimentation and that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had monitored their activities while in the Marines. On his quest for the truth, Thornley filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with several agencies, including ONI, who eventual¬ly responded with a letter stating that no records existed in their files related to either he or Os¬wald. Thornley suspected that the ONI’s response was a cover story, and that the files had actually been destroyed. (Former CIA Director Richard Helms admitted having destroyed MK-ULTRA-related files during his tenure.)

In addition to Thornley’s ONI-FOIA re¬quest, he placed a similar one with the FBI. This, in turn, generated a response from then FBI director Clarence Kelley—which was probably standard operating procedure during this period—stating that the Bureau had received said request, and would respond in due course. Apparently, Di¬rector Kelley’s response indicated (at least to Thornley) that he wished to initiate a dialogue. This resulted in Kerry firing off a volley of rambling letters similar to correspondence he had previously sent to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) about a group of Quakers in Atlanta who were actually clandestine intelligence agents that were spying on him.

The FBI/FOIA materials Thornley eventually received contained nothing in relation to MK-ULTRA, or any other documentation con¬firming that Kerry and/or Oswald had been targets of a clandestine intelligence operation. However—as Director Kelley outlined in a corresponding letter—Thornley’s FOIA files included incidental references concerning his Warren Commission testimony, as well as miscellaneous documents related to the HSCA investigation, many of which Kerry himself had provided to the committee.

Not addressed in Director Kelley’s response—and evidently not included as part of Thornley‘s FOIA packet—was a 1970 memo (now available at www.maryferrell.org) which indicated that the FBI had monitored Kerry’s activities in relation to a libertarian publication he edited during the mid-sixties called The Innovator. Also missing were the contents of the FBI file that attorney Albert Jenner produced during Kerry’s appearance before the Warren Commission. It appears someone was holding something back. The files related to The Innovator are included in the Assassination Records Review Board (AARC) established in the early nineties and—one would assume—became part of this collection due to the fact that Thornley was mentioned in these FBI-Innovator related memos.

By 1970, Thornley was no longer associated with The Innovator, which by this time had changed its name to Efficacy, and apparently with this change of ownership the magazine had taken over the same P.O. Box The Innovator staff had previously used. Also mentioned on Page 1 is Thornley’s future wife, Cara Leach, who apparently owned the P.O. Box prior to her marriage to Kerry in 1965.

Page 3 mentions a curious incident from January of 1967 when Thornley volunteered information to the Los Angeles FBI Field Office about a “group of ‘psychotics’ he had met who were preaching an extremely violent line of thinking…”

The episode with the “psychotics”—as recounted in my book The Prankster and the Conspiracy —occurred when Kerry and wife Cara were walking past a restaurant in L.A. and were greeted by two young men and a woman who presented themselves as anarchists. Kerry informed the trio that he was also an anarchist, and he and Cara joined them for a bite to eat.

One of these anarchists was named Jonathan Leake, who referred to himself as a “theoretician” for the Resurgence Youth Movement, a group purportedly involved in recruiting outlaw motorcycle gangs for revolutionary street fighting. Before long, Kerry and Leake got into a heated debate about using violence as a revolutionary tactic, to which Kerry was adamantly opposed on the grounds that it involved torture. In response, Leake said: “Torture is beautiful, man” which threw Kerry for a loop, and he thought it better not to disagree with any further Leake or someday he might wind up on the business end of just this sort of revolutionary mayhem.

Leake informed Kerry that he was in possession of a trunk full of revolutionary propaganda, and that he needed a place to temporarily stash it. Leake asked Kerry if he wouldn’t mind taking it home with him for safekeeping until the next day when Leake could come by and pick it up. Kerry warily agreed.

When Kerry got back home he tore into the anarchist literature, which came across as a crude imitation of someone who believed that anarchy meant violence and chaos. Among other insanities, the group advocated dosing the water supplies of large cities with LSD, and invading middle class nightclubs and beating up the clientele.

Kerry smoked a joint and proceeded to brood over the Resurgence propaganda. After acquiring a serious case of the munchies, he went into the kitchen and it was then that he noticed a man up on a telephone pole in his back alley and immediately went into a panic, suspecting that this telephone-repairman-in-disguise was there to tap his phone in preparation for a prospective pot bust—although in reality the pot bust would just be a pretext for a seizure of the Resurgence literature, the ultimate goal of which was to portray Kerry in the newspapers as a militant revolutionary. Somewhere at the core of this marijuana muddled paranoia, Kerry suspected that his opposition to the Warren Report was somehow at the root of this perceived harassment.

On account of these marijuana induced revelations, Kerry came to the conclusion that Jonathan Leake was most likely an agent provocateur who was part of a conspiracy to misrepresent his anarchist ideas, after which Kerry would be kicked around in the public arena and his views on the Warren Report discredited.

After mulling over the situation, Kerry decided his most logical course of action was to take samples of the Resurgence propaganda to the local FBI office and alert the Feds of the existence of this subversive group. So that’s exactly what he did, and before long found himself sitting in the presence of a young, clean-cut and humorless FBI agent, who failed to crack a hint of a smile when Kerry informed him that his FBI file was over an inch thick. (During his Warren Commission testimony, Kerry had seen the folder containing his FBI file, although he never actually reviewed the contents.) Kerry shared the Resurgence literature with the FBI agent, and then afterwards headed home.

Later that day, Kerry received a phone call from Leake who asked him what he thought of the Resurgence literature. Kerry told him he had only a few minor points of disagreement, and invited Leake over talk about it and pick up his material. Leake informed Kerry that might not be immediately possible, as he and his fellow anarchists had just been picked up by the police. Fortunately, Kerry never heard from Leake again.

Notes:

1.Thornley, Kerry; “Oswald and I—and the FBI”, galley proof, date unknown.

2.Ibid.

Portions of this article in a somewhat altered form were excerpted from my books:

Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation (Feral House, 2014)

The Prankster and the Conspiracy: Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture (Paraview Press, 2003)

For more on Kerry Thornley and Discordianism check out Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society (RVP Press, 2014)

HistoriaDiscordia.com

Adam Gorightly is best known for his book on the Manson Family, The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos. Adam has appeared as a guest on numerous radio shows such as Coast To Coast AM with Ian Punnett and Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis. Television appearances include the History Channel’s documentary The Manson Murders.

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