Gerald Patrick Hemming, Jr., a swashbuckling six-foot five ex-Marine turned soldier-of-fortune, who personally knew many of the prominent personages of the tumultuous sixties, and whose name appears with regularity in the books and articles on the Kennedy assassination, died Monday at his home in Fayetteville, North Carolina after a lengthy illness. Born in Los Angeles on March 1, 1937, Hemming was 71.
After he left the Marine Corp in the fall of 1958, Hemming travelled to Cuba and assist the newly formed Castro government in military training. In Cuba, Hemming worked as an instructor in a Cuban parachute regiment and was later named adjutant of the San Julien air base. Hemming claims while at San Julien he thwarted an assassination attempt by a disgruntled Cuban soldier who intended to shoot against Fidel Castro while he toured the air base with Soviet envoy Anderi Mikoyan.
In Cuba, Hemming met and worked with another American named William Morgan who in April 1961 was brutally executed by Castro forces for being a traitor. Hemming stated that he met Jack Ruby at Morgan's residence. Morgan's US citizenship was restored in 2007. In Cuba he also met Frank Fiorini, also known as Frank Sturgis who gained notoriety in 1974 as one of the Watergate burglars.
Hemming met and liked Che Guevera who he described as a man of his word. Hemming claimed he had a secret meeting with Guevera during the height of the Cuban missile crisis.
Hemming fled Cuba in the fall of 1960 and was extensively debriefed by the CIA regarding Castro's military operations. He then started a paramilitary organization named Intercontinental Penetration Force or Interpen, which trained first in the Everglades and later on No Name Key, a small, mosquito-infested island thirty miles north of Key West. The group was sometimes known as "Patrick's raiders".
Hemming's group was heavily funded by right-wing Caribbean dictators but some believe there was secret funding from the CIA. Hemming claimed to be reporting to James Jesus Angleton, the controversial chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence arm. Hemming also had familial ties to the intelligence community: his uncle had been a business partner with John McCone, JFK's Director of the CIA.
In December 1962, Hemming and a dozen of his Interpen group were arrested in the Florida Keys shortly before leaving on a secret mission to Cuba. Jailed overnight in Key West, the group was bailed out by a Miami attorney who flew them to Miami on a chartered seaplane. Hemming stated that when they arrived in Miami, Oswald attempted to infiltrate their group but Hemming instructed his men to remove Oswald. Several months later when Hemming and his lawyer participated in a Miami radio talk show, a man identifying himself as Lee Oswald called the show. A week after the assassination, the talk show host reported the incident to the FBI. In 1978, Hemming testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he had met Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Cuban Consulate in January 1959, was suspicious of Oswald's motives and the information he was seeking. Subsequently, Hemming advised his Cuban friends to get rid of Oswald.
On bail restriction arising from the arrest in the Florida Keys, Hemming was unable to return to Los Angeles for a Christmas reunion with his family. A short time thereafter, his father, who owned a television repair shop, died. Hemming always regretted missing that last Christmas with his father. He told one writer that for months after his father died he would call his father's business after hours just to listen to his father's voice on the recorded announcement of the business hours.
In March of 1963, Hemming traveled to Dallas, Texas seeking financial support for his Interpen group. One of the person contacted included former Gen. Edwin Walker, who was shot at by Lee Oswald a few weeks later.
Hemming testified to the HSCA that in the summer of 1963 he was personally offered money to arrange the murder of JFK; specifying one such offer was made in the home of New Orleans private investigator Guy Banister and another in the Dallas Petroleum Club.
In the late 1980s Hemming and two of his Interpen associates served as consultants to Oliver Stone's movie "JFK". He can be seen briefly in the film as the man co-coordinating the assassination. Although some speculate that members of Interpen may have been involved in the assassination, Hemming always denied that charge, but has suggested that several years later he learned the details of the assassination from persons who were involved. Among his controversial claims was that Kennedy assassination was funded in part by members of the family of Rafeal Trujillo, the Dominican Republic dictator assassinated in April 1961, and that there was a separate shooter in the Texas School Book Depository with a contract to kill Governor John Connally. He also claimed that the conspirators had planted a bomb in a car parked near the triple underpass that could have been used to blow up the entire presidential limousine had the shooters been unable to deliver a fatal head shot.
Hemming may have given us the answer to some of the mysteries of the assassination. For instance, he has identified the Mexico City mystery man as German born Mario Tauler Sague, recruited for the CIA by Bill Harvey while Harvey was the Berlin station chief. Sague was involved in one of the earliest attempts on Castro's life.
At the conference in Dallas, Hemming claimed to know Sylvia Odio's visitors were. He stated that one of them had once saved his life. In 2005, he finally revealed the names. The man who saved his life was Angelo Murgado, the "Angel" in the Odio story, and "Leopoldo" was Bernardo DeTorres, a name familiar to most students of the assassination. The names were first publicly identified in an article written by Mark Howell and Tim Gratz for the Key West Citizen. Murgado was interviewed in person by Prof Joan Mellen (in the presence of Hemming) and she tells the story in her book "A Farewell to Justice". Murgado was also interviewed by David Talbot for his book "Brothers". In "Brothers", Talbot states that Murgado told him that he, Murgado, had shown Robert F Kennedy the newspaper article and photo of Lee Oswald passing out literature in New Orleans, leading to the disturbing conclusion that when RFK learned of the arrest of Oswald for the murder of his brother, he recognized Oswald's name and photo.
Howard K. Davis, who served as an Army ranger in the Korean War and worked with the Castro forces in 1958 before the abdication of Batista, was the second in command of the Interpen group and worked closely with Hemming for many years. Davis, who now works for Homeland Security at the Miami airport, said of Hemming, "Hemming was at heart an idealist who longed for freedom for the Cuban people and like so many was disappointed that Castro betrayed the stated goals of his revolution. Gerry loved the Cuban people, spoke Spanish fluently and he is remembered with great fondness in the Cuban exile community. He named one of his sons after a Cuban exile who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against Castro."
Hemming has been interviewed by various JFK researchers, and was a featured speaker at the JFK Lancer November in Dallas Conference in 1996. Hemming's HSCA testimony given on June 17, 1993, was donated by Noel Twyman to JFK Lancer for distribution. There are many who believe that most of Hemming's stories were nothing but the creation of a clever mind while others are equally confident that he carried some secrets of the assassination to his grave. Perhaps the epitaph that should appear on his grave is the description once given him by an assassination writer: "Valedictorian in a Guerilla Suit."
