Reinhard Gehlen was a Wehrmacht Major General and head of intelligence for the Nazis on the eastern front. Before Nazi Germany fell, Gehlen moved fifty containers of intelligence files on the Soviet Union and then gave them to the Americans. After the war, Gehlen headed up an intelligence effort for the allies on Soviet bloc countries.
On May 26, 1967, Bill Boxley, an investigator for Jim Garrison, called the office and his conversation was recorded so that Garrison could listen later. Boxley was in Dallas checking names in Clay Shaw's address book, and felt there might be ties between Shaw and the Gehlen intelligence apparatus. Here is the memo:
This is all insane. On the second page, Boxley talks about Thomas Marion Cox, "Now there is no record of this young man ever having lived at 4017C Rawlins but I think it is noteworthy at least that this is three houses away from Eva Grant's where Jack Ruby registered his residence in the City Directory." Propinquity in action! And Cox's mother was evasive, "So there was no overt reasons for her to hide his whereabouts but she was apparently was [sic] because she said he was due there for dinner, but hadn't shown up."
Boxley's search for Herman G. Wilhelm Bachelman is hilarious. His ex-wife remembered that "he read an awful lot, she said, about the Third Reich, and he was an admirer, she said, of the tactics of the S.S. elite corps." He arrived in the United States in New Orleans and Boxley speculates that "It sounds very much, in intelligence patterns, as if Shaw was a reception committee for Bachelman's arrival and he sent him on to Dallas..."
There also seems to be a similarity between Cox and Bachelman - "Being in photography. Again he parallels the Cox boy. They're both 27 years of age. Cox had it as a hobby: Bachelman studied it, worked at it professionally. And both of them parallel Oswald, a typographer and photographer background. Now it looks very much to me as if this is an agent sent in here, about Oswald's age you will recall - this is an agent sent in here and they train it."
And, of course, "there is some probably homosexuality involved here because Cox especially is a suspect of homosexuality. He worked for Glenn of Hollywood here in Dallas which has been described to me by my source as a nest of homosexuals."
What a surprise! Clay Shaw has some homosexuals in his address book.
On page ten, Martin asks Boxley if he can support his belief that Shaw was part of the Gehlen apparatus, and he replies, "Well, no more than we've got. But I think it is terrific support we've got already."
I don't know what happened when Garrison listened to the tape, but a few short months later, Garrison wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell and he talked about the Gehlen intelligence apparatus.
Towards the end of 1968, there was a staff revolt against Bill Boxley. You can read about it in my book, On The Trail of Delusion - Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser. Harold Weisberg and Vincent Salandria came up with a plan to convince Garrison that Boxley was a CIA plant. He was not a plant - he just fed back Garrison's delusions, and he became his favorite investigator.
If you have trouble with Weisberg's prose, you're not alone. He was not the greatest writer, and no one was there to edit his work. But, the plan worked and Boxley was fired by Garrison in December of 1968,
By the way, there is no mention of the Gehlen intelligence apparatus in Garrison's book.