Behind the Cover of Textbooks

Spies, Assassins, Gun Runners, Drug Smugglers and School Books: The Incredible Story of the Texas School Book Depository

The Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) moved into the seven-story, 411 Elm Street building during the summer of 1963, but exactly when is unknown. The difficulty of obtaining specific details may be due to the building’s role in JFK’s assassination, but there is something else to consider. From clues derived from a variety of sources,  it’s very likely that company executives used school books to disguise shipments of firearms and narcotics.

During the latter part of the 1930s, the federal government secretly allowed Nationalist Chinese to import opium into the U.S. The Chinese needed cash to pay troops and buy weapons in its fight against the Communist Chinese. A two-way traffic developed, with guns leaving the United States to supply China, and drugs coming in to pay for them. To protect the Nationalist Chinese from political repercussions, the drug trafficking was blamed on the Red Chinese.  Mao Tse-Tung had ordered the cultivation of opium on a grand scale to raise money to wage war. However, there was a lot of evidence that the Nationalist Chinese were doing the same thing.

After the communists took over the mainland in 1949 and Chiang Kai-Shek moved his government to Taiwan, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave his blessing to a diplomatic mission to Taiwan to facilitate the importation of drugs from Burma. Providing most of the funds for this mission was Texas oil man, H. L. Hunt. One of the points of entry for Chinese heroin was across the Mexican border into Laredo, Texas.

In a July, 1959, report “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East,” Garland Williams, a top official in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), accused the Central Intelligence Agency of encouraging the Chinese to produce drugs. According to Williams, the CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies operated the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the world.

Towards the end of World War II, Mexico became another source of drugs. In 1945, Jack Ruby’s sister, Eva Ruby Grant, and Paul Roland Jones were partners in picking up opium delivered to Dallas from the Durango area of Mexico and sending it to Hyman Ruby in Chicago via shipments of iron pipe.

The TSBD Connection

The Hugh Perry Book Depository,  the predecessor of the TSBD, acted as an independent agency for a group of publishers to warehouse and distribute textbooks to schools in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico.  On October 29, 1945, Hugh Perry hired a mysterious clerk named William Shelley who had been an intelligence agent during the war and afterwards joined the CIA.  In his previous job at a defense plant, he served as an informant for a counterespionage unit. This undercover work carried over into Hugh Perry, where schoolbooks concealed clandestine shipments of guns and drugs.

Jack Ruby’s Involvement

It seems like no matter which rock you turn over, Jack Ruby comes wiggling out.  Money generated by the sale of drugs required laundering, and gambling was one way to do that. In November 1946, Paul Roland Jones approached Sheriff Steve Guthrie and promised him a starting salary of $150,000 a year if he allowed his friends from Chicago to bring slot machines and floating crap games into Dallas. A guy from Chicago named Jack Ruby would be in charge of this operation and that he was due to arrive in the spring of 1947. Guthrie said he would think it over and agreed to another meeting. However, Guthrie was an honest man and turned to the Texas Rangers for help. Led by W. E. “Dub” Naylor, the Rangers made a secret tape recording of the second meeting between Jones and Guthrie. It took a month to gather enough evidence to arrest or drive out these gangsters. Among those arrested was Jack’s sister, Eva Ruby, the owner of a restaurant in Dallas and a partner with Jones in sending opium to Chicago. Victory over these mobsters was short-lived, for Jack Ruby arrived the following year and started various gambling enterprises around the city.

During this same period Jack Ruby was involved in counterintelligence. Officially, he was an aircraft mechanic in the Army Air Corps from May 1943 until February 1946 at various bases in the South. His brother Sam was also in the Air Corps as an informer, keeping an eye on communists and nazis and writing letters to his brother Jack about his observations. Although Sam wrote the letters as if they were to his brother, he actually addressed the envelopes to a counterintelligence officer. On three separate occasions in about summer 1943, early 1944, and early 1947, Ruby went to a union hall in Muncie, Indiana to participate in meetings with communists. The union hall was on the third story of a three-story building, where gambling often happened during evenings and weekends. Ruby met with Russian Jews, some of whom were communists.

Additionally, Ruby was an informer for the FBN. After the shooting of Oswald, Mort Benjamin, an FBN agent in New York, found a file showing that Ruby had been an informer since the 1940s. When Benjamin returned to read the file again, it was missing. Apparently, someone had taken every document related to the FBN’s relationship with Ruby.

Not long after Castro came to power on January 1, 1959, Jack Ruby contacted gun-smuggler Robert McKeown in Houston and told him that he was “in with the Mafia and had a whole lot of jeeps he wanted to get to Castro.” Ruby also wanted advice on how he could gain the release of a couple of friends imprisoned in Cuba. During the period of 1958 through 1959, Ruby was heavily involved in smuggling arms to Castro’s forces. He also met with the FBI nine times over the course of the year 1959, presumably to talk about his travels to Cuba.

After Castro turned communist, the CIA wanted to get rid of him. CIA operative William Harvey, who came from Indianapolis, and his partner Johnny Roselli, a Chicago mobster, plotted to kill Castro. Noel Twyman, author of Bloody Treason, presented evidence showing that these two men were also involved in the planning of the JFK assassination.

Ruby’s work as an informer is comparable to that of an employee at the TSBD. Joe Molina, credit manager for the TSBD since February, 1947, knew Bill Lowery, an undercover agent for the FBI. In 1955 Molina and Lowery became interested in a leftist group called the American GI Forum, an organization that had the goal of fighting injustices perpetrated against people of Mexican descent. Molina and Lowery were among six individuals who formed the Dallas chapter of the GI Forum. The following year Lowery nominated Molina as chairman.

In testimony given at a hearing of the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1963, Lowery admitted he was an FBI informant infiltrating the GI Forum. By implication his friend Molina was an informant too. The Dallas police became interested in Molina after the assassination and investigated him as a suspect. They publicized his connections to alleged communists, and as a result Molina lost his job at the TSBD. If Molina was an undercover agent, then he was one of four such operatives in one location. The other three were Bill Shelley, Joe Bergin, and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Guess Who Owned the Texas School Book Depository?

The owner of the 411 Elm Street building was a man named D. Harold Byrd, an ultraconservative oil tycoon and also a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) for Texas and Louisiana. Serving under him as a CAP commander was David Ferrie, a CIA contract pilot. Among Byrd’s cadets were Lee Harvey Oswald and Barry Seal. As a cadet, Seal was a gun smuggler, flying wooden crates filled with guns and ammo from the La Combe airfield in Louisiana. Ferrie paid Seal $400 a week to fly this cargo.

Byrd had owned the 411 Elm Street since 1936. The Hugh Perry Book Depository leased the building in June, 1963, and changed the name to the Texas School Book Depository.  A number of book publishing companies also had offices in the building, among them the Scott Foresman Company.  About a month after the company opened its offices in the TSBD, a  visitor to Scott Foresman Company accidentally went into the wrong room on the fourth floor. The visitor saw an open storage area that took up two-thirds of the floor. He saw numerous cardboard boxes, about four feet square by five feet high, filling the storage area. The visitor who was familiar with the logistics of book publishing thought they were unusually large boxes for books. A box of books that large would weigh about 2400 pounds. There were no forklifts in the building, so how did the warehouse men move the boxes around?  Obviously, they were not containers of books.

Lee Harvey Oswald Is Hired.

On October 15, 1963, Roy Truly hired Lee Harvey Oswald to be an order filler.  Truly supposedly was unaware that Oswald was an outspoken Marxist, a former defector to the Soviet Union, and a card-carrying member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  “Who is that queer duck?” asked Geneva Hine, TSBD office worker, who wondered why Oswald never smiled or said “hello” or “good morning.”

Before Oswald moved to New Orleans posing as a pro-Castro demonstrator, he had worked as a cameraman for a typesetting company in Dallas called Jaggars Chiles Stovall (JCS) from October, 1962, to April, 1963. Some of the work he did there consisted of secret projects for the Navy and the Army Mapping Service. Oswald was also one of the employees who worked on maps of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in spite of his known communist leanings.  He made no secret of his trip to the Soviet Union or his ongoing correspondence with the Russian Embassy in Washington and communist organizations in New York. Obviously JCS would not have tolerated such a blatant security risk unless Oswald was involved in counterespionage.

From May to July, 1963, Oswald worked for the William Reilly Coffee Company in New Orleans. During this time, he was involved in a lot of pro-Castro activity, such as handing out literature on street corners. Next door to the coffee company was Adrian Alba’s parking garage where the Secret Service, FBI and CIA parked their cars. Oswald often went to the garage and read gun magazines. In reality he was an undercover agent working for private detective Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent.  On at least two occasions, Alba saw an agent in an FBI car deliver envelopes to Oswald at the garage. If JCS and Reilly Coffee hid Oswald’s undercover activities, then the TSBD probably hid them as well.

While at the TSBD, Oswald came into contact with others who were leading double lives, among them Joe Molina, a friend of undercover agent Bill Lowery and possibly a spy himself; supervisor William Shelley, a CIA man; and Joe Bergin, office manager of Scott Foresman, who was involved with the Texas Rangers.

A Bird’s Eye View of the Assassination

On November 22, TSBD employees Mary Hollies and Betty Foster were on the fourth floor looking out of a window in the stock area between the Scott Foresman office and the west wall of the building. Inside the Scott Foresman office were Yola Hopson and Ruth Nelson at a window on the west side. To their left were Dorothy Garner, Sandra Styles, Elsie Dorman, and Victoria Adams grouped around two more windows.

According to Adams, as the President’s limousine passed the building, they heard three loud booms coming from the right and below (the grassy knoll) rather than from the left and above (the sixth floor sniper’s nest). Adams and Styles decided to go outside and see what happened. They ran down the back stairs.  When they reached the first floor and saw Shelley and Lovelady standing near the freight elevators, Adams said, “I believe the President’s been shot.” The two men did not respond. Their calm and indifferent demeanor seemed odd.  About a minute or two earlier, someone in a brown suit coat exited a freight elevator, ran by Shelley and Lovelady out the back door. The man in the brown suit might have been Malcolm Wallace.

On the day JFK was killed, William Shelley had a crew of six TSBD employees adding new plywood flooring on the sixth floor.  They had been working on the project for the entire month of November, and the building owner was anxious to complete the project.  He brought in two additional workers from the outside.  Their names were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Emilio Santana.  Almost nothing is known about these men beyond the fact that they were Cuban dissidents believed to be associates of Antonio Veciana, head of the radical Alpha 66 group dedicated to the overthrow of Fidel Castro.  Several assassination theories have Herminio Diaz Garcia as one of the JFK shooters. We’ll never know because members of the Warren Commission never questioned the men.  In fact, their names aren’t even mentioned in the entire Warren Report.