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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z
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Who
is Jim Moore?
"It was awful," he recalls. "That's when I found out I just wasn't cut out to be a salesman." He felt the "pitch" that he was a student "earning points" for an education was a scam and after he returned a customer's money to her he was fired and left standing on a downtown street corner in Des Moines, Iowa. "I was scared to death. Here I was, standing on a busy corner in a city I didn't know at all, with this big, blue heavy trunk that had everything I owned in it at the time." He says he finally found where the YMCA was and dragged himself and his trunk there, where he landed a job as a dishwasher to help pay for his room. Meet the Cubans "One day before my shift I was sitting out in the lobby, just off the cafeteria area, reading this newspaper about the Bay of Pigs and Cuban exiles. I'd been fascinated by it when I was in high school and here was a small paper actually written by those who had lived it. This light-skinned black guy comes up, younger than me, and sits down next to me when he notices what I'm reading. He was real skinny, curly-headed with a bad case of acne. That was my first introduction to Manuel Acivedos. Manuel told me he was 17 and had lived in Cienfuegos, Cuba, just a few miles from where the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. His father, he said, had been a doctor, until Castro took over and took everything they owned, forcing them to leave the country. "Manuel was about the first and only person I knew in Des Moines, and he was friendly, so I stuck to him. I had a small room there at the YMCA, just big enough for a small bed, a chair and a dresser. We'd go up there and talk about the Cuban situation, and he told me there was a group of Cubans in Des Moines that distributed the paper through an organization called the Cuban Student Directorate. They were all professional people, he said, who had lost everything after the Castro takeover, and were determined to throw Castro out and return home to a Free Cuba. "From my conversations with him, I attempted to write my first article - for the Des Moines Register. I actually got inside the building with it and was able to talk to one of the editors. He was friendly and encouraged me, but said that they really had their own people who were quite experienced at that sort of thing. I don't remember his name, but he was kind enough to give me an old manual typewriter and tell me to keep trying. That's probably what started my journalism career." What he did not know, Moore says, was that his new young Cuban friend was a homosexual. "Once when I had him up to my room, he brought along all these body-building magazines and wanted to show them to me. He kept asking what I thought of each of these different guys in the pictures. I was never much into sports and so I guess I was pretty non-committal. I'd shrug and say, 'Oh, I guess he looks OK.' Finally, Manuel shrugged and tossed the magazine down and said, 'You don't understand, do you?' "'Understand what?' I asked. "'I've been trying to seduce you." "I was stunned. I was so damned naive I hadn't had a clue. I figured he just had an obsession with body-building because he was so skinny. He told me he was 'queer' (they didn't use the word 'gay' in those days) and he was lonely. Because he was a 'mulatto' he said he wasn't accepted by either blacks or whites and couldn't find a girl, so he had turned to men. Because he was the only friend I had, I didn't throw him out, but at the same time it made me wary of him and others around me. I explained to Manuel that I just wasn't interested; I had just left Lawrence, Kansas and was very much in love with a girl named Merideth I had dated there. He said he understood and we'd still be friends. I thought that was more or less the end of it." The two later shared an apartment, he says, and Manuel introduced him to the local Cuban community, the Cuban Student Directorate. "At first there wasn't a lot to tell. Some well-dressed older guy seemed to run things. I'd seen him in the YMCA cafeteria with some amazingly beautiful young women. Manuel told me that was a front, the man was actually 'queer' and the women were just window dressing to make him look good and keep his respectability. They were all still in the closet in those days. "Manuel and I were driven over to this nice stone house set back from the street and surrounded by a heavy wall of shrubs; neither of us had a car of our own. It wasn't a real big house, but it was set up like an office, not a home. There were these guys - big, muscular guys - running around like they were always behind in what they had to do. They spoke Spanish; I don't think any of them spoke English in front of me except Manuel, who was explaining things to me. He mentioned names, but none of them stuck. "One of them came out of another room and said something to Manuel in Spanish. They talked back and forth a few minutes and this guy gave me a real hard look. Then Manuel turned to me and said, 'He wants to know if you're here to help or just to stare. I told him you're OK. He's got some work for you to do.' The work was filing index cards and letters - in Spanish. Manuel was always my interpreter. We'd work a few hours and then we'd be driven back to the YMCA. "This kept up for maybe a month or so, and evolved into writing things, typing them out. Manuel would tell me what to type, in English, as he read from some paper or document in Spanish. They were articles for, I guess, their newspaper. It wasn't printed in Des Moines; I think it was printed in Miami somewhere." The Cuban Assignments Within a short time, Moore says Manuel asked him if he wanted to go on a trip to Miami with them. "I was worried about losing my job, but they said not to worry, it would be there when I got back. So I went. We drove down. I never said much because I couldn't speak Spanish and I had no idea what they were saying. We went to some shabby little storefront office and I was introduced around, but again it was pretty much all in Spanish. One guy spoke English, but he didn't say much; he was on the phone a lot. Manuel asked me if I could take photographs, and I said sure. They handed me a camera and had me take some pictures of different people - mug shots, I'd call them now. I think they were for publication. I'd take the pictures, give the camera back and we'd leave the next day or two." This happened maybe two or three times, then Manuel one spring day in Miami said they were going to another town, by boat. They piled into a motorboat "maybe 16 feet long or so" and ended up at "what looked like an old deserted military base on an island." At night, Moore recalls the journey. "There were, if I remember right, five or six of these boats, full of Cubans, One boat I know of had a white guy in it. There could have been others. Manuel said he was a photographer from Life magazine. I don't know if he was or not. I asked Manuel where we were going and he'd just put his finger to his lips to shush me up. Finally, I got frustrated and whispered to him to tell me what the hell was going on. He whispered back to me that we were going into Cuba to 'take out' Castro. He said he couldn't say anything earlier because it wasn't safe. I think my heart just stopped dead when he said that. "Well, as it turned out we weren't going to Cuba to 'take out' Castro at all. That was just hyperbole, a figure of speech. What we were doing, though, was we were going in to blow up some things, like sugar mills. My job was to just row the boat and shut up, as we killed the engine and moved in closer to shore. They didn't tell me squat, but Manuel handed me an old bolt-action rifle he pulled out of a canvas tarp and told me to 'stand guard' until they got back. I was scared shitless, sitting out there all alone on this f--king boat in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, I was excited, too. I knew there were other guys in the other boats, but they were spaced far enough apart I couldn't see them. I just knew - or hoped - they were there and if anything happened, somebody would know what to do because I sure as hell didn't. "For about an hour it was real quiet, then I started hearing these far-away dull booms, like explosions, and then I heard gunfire in the distance, maybe a mile or two, I'm not sure. About 20-30 minutes later, the sporadic gunfire got closer and closer, and all of a sudden I heard this crashing sound as these guys came charging out of the woods or weeds, and someone was yelling something in Spanish. Then a voice yelled in English "start the motors!" Hell, I'd never looked at the damn motors before. I didn't know how to start it up. I was trying to still find it when guys started jumping into the boat. I looked around behind me and I could see spotlights or flashlights coming toward us. This one guy pushed me out of the way real hard and started the motor. I fell against the boat and busted my lip when he pushed me. He pushed the rifle into my hand and pointed at the searchlights and yelled at me. I assumed that meant I was supposed to start shooting at the lights, so I did. I think I hit a couple of guys - the lights fell to the ground and the spot where they had been went dark. I don't know. I've often wondered if I killed anybody that night. Meanwhile, everyone was piling back into the boats. That whole thing was pretty quiet actually. The only yelling seemed to be in the beginning when they first came back and were yelling instructions - and cussing me out, I suppose. "We got all the boats out into the water and roared off full speed. Later I was told one boats had been captured. We got out into the water several miles, then the motor was killed and we all sat there while the guys in charge listened for any sounds of a pursuit or planes. When we got back to where we started, it was like it had all been a bad dream. Manuel was pissed at me because his guys were pissed at him, and I was pissed at Manuel for not telling me anything and making me look so damned stupid. Nobody spoke to either one of us the whole trip back to Des Moines, and I never saw the guys again. Manuel and I had a big argument and we didn't speak to each for several days after we got back. "We finally made peace, but an issue I thought had been dead and buried kept coming up - Manuel kept wanting to get me into a homosexual relationship. He'd cry and carry on and I felt sorry for him; it was like he'd become a little brother to me, but no way was I gonna do what he wanted. I was homesick for Meri and after she and her mother came up for a brief visit, all I wanted was to go back to her. I left all my stuff with Manuel - my science fair medals, books, awards, pictures and all that, and I told him I'd be back to get them in about a month. When I came back, I was given an address where Manuel said a friend was keeping them. When I knocked on the door, this big black 'queen' opened it up and started screaming at me she was going to kill me for what I'd done to poor Manuel. I got the hell out of there and never went back." Moore says he believed in the anti-Castro cause at the time, "like everybody else in the country." "I was angry because I hadn't been trained or told what was going on. I felt stupid and embarrassed and I felt like I had been blamed for something that wasn't my fault. But I didn't doubt the Cause. Castro was a Commie, a bad guy. He had to go." Moore returned to Kansas City, near Lawrence, where for a while he stayed with his cousin, the daughter of an uncle who worked at a Ford plant. He [Moore] worked a series of odd jobs before ending up at the Federal Reserve Bank as a clerk processing cashed-in savings bonds. "I had broken up with Meri, she dumped me for somebody else. I was drinking too much. I was living in the rattiest damned place in a black part of Kansas City. I was miserable. I was 18 and felt like my life was over. I stole two TV sets and traded them in on an old black Ford and headed back to Pratt, Kansas." "It was many years later before I ever heard the name 'Cuban Student Directorate' again. I was working in Chicago as a journalist and learned from Victor Marchetti, a CIA agent-turned-author that I had been working for the CIA and never knew it. The Cuban Foreign Student Directorate (DRE), he said, had been the most violent of the Cuban exile groups, more so than even Alpha 66 or the 2506 Brigade. And - he added cryptically - they had been involved in carrying out the assassination of John Kennedy. I felt sick. I had quit college to go off in search of myself, and, I suppose at a subconscious level, in search of who killed JFK. I had met the enemy coming full circle, and I had willingly helped spread the poison." Today, what I did would be called terrorism. From Terrorist to Newspaper Reporter After returning to Pratt, he started attending Pratt Community College and worked as a reporter at the Pratt Daily Tribune. "It didn't take a lot of qualifications," he recalls. "The job required somebody with a high school education who could type 30 words a minute. Everybody there was new at the same time I was. Our sports editor's name was Leroy. He had been working at a service station before he came on. There was another reporter named Marsha. I can't remember their last names. The publisher was Chuck Barnes. Chuck was a great guy, and I learned a lot from him." Chuck Barnes had been adopted and his adoptive father owned a small chain of newspapers, of which the award-winning Tribune was one. Chuck was a pilot who had his own Piper Cub, and introduced his new young reporter to the joys of flying. "I started out doing the obits, the dull, boring stuff, and managed to sneak a feature story in once in a while, and I'd take pictures. Chuck had a rule that I've always tried to follow ever since: 'I don't want to see any pictures in this paper where anyone's face is smaller than a quarter,' he said. 'People like to see the warts and all, close up.' He told me Saturday Evening Post editor Ben Hibbs had started out here and I had a tradition to keep up. "One incident that really stuck in my mind about his philosophy was a car accident I was in. I was driving my girlfriend's car (Barbara Stillwell) on a dirt road near Pratt when we came over a hill and there was all this debris piled in the middle of the road. I went into a skid as I turned the car and we flipped end over end. Barbara got a broken spine (she recovered) and I was just sore as hell. After we got out of the hospital, I went back to the paper and Chuck looked at me and said, 'Well, where's the story? You're a newspaperman, aren't you?'
"Pratt played host to the Miss Kansas Pageant and it was in 1966; Life magazine sent photographers to every state pageant so they could do a complete front-to-finish story on the new Miss America, whoever she would be. She came from Kansas that year; and her name was Debbie Bryant. My job also was to do the stories and pictures on the Miss Kansas pageant, so I watched this Life photographer very carefully to learn anything I could from him. "I thought Debbie Bryant was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - close up anyway, and the Tribune had more pictures of her than any other candidate. My gut told she was a winner. "I was puzzled, though, by the Life photographer, when it dawned on me he never changed film. I asked him about it. He laughed and gave me a valuable lesson I never forgot. "'The camera has no film in it,' he explained. I was dumbfounded. 'These girls are all so self-conscious that when they see a camera, they freeze up, paste on their phony smile and try to pose for the camera. I get them bored with it, so they go back to the way they really are - then I put film in the camera!'" I guess that's why he was a Life magazine photographer and I was a $90-a-week cub reporter. At least I had good taste and knew I had picked a winner, despite some kidding at the office over my photographic 'favoritism.'" While at the Tribune, Moore became an Associated Press stringer photographer. "One of my best was the butt-end of a bull at a rodeo," he laughs. During National Fire Prevention Week, he stayed up all night assembling the best from old file photos of local firefighters on the scene; it resulted in a full-page spread, and he was promoted to State Editor as well as Features Editor. "We had, I think, 32-36 stringers in maybe 17 counties, mostly little old ladies who wrote for a penny or two a word. All we got from them was stuff like 'Aunt Mabel spent Sunday afternoon at dinner with Suzie Smith' - stuff nobody else wanted to read. My job was to visit each one of them and educate them on what 'news' was, and to improve the quality of our area news. Also, I was to turn in one good feature story myself every week. It was a great job; I got to drive all around the country every day doing what I came to love." UFO flap startles America Moore's first encounter with the world of UFOs since learning of the Roswell crash on his tour of Boeing Aircraft came in 1966, when a "UFO flap" captured the attention of America. A wave of sightings swept across 17 states. "A friend of mine, Jim Swindler, were out in one of the state parks doing a story when we heard about this wave of sightings in Oklahoma City. The radio [KOMA] was reporting that one had crashed into a lake, burning a girl as it went down. It sounded a lot more interesting than what we were doing, so we packed up the car and headed to Oklahoma." He could not confirm the radio story, and it seemed the Air Force had allegedly moved the family out of the house to parts unknown. Moore says he and a group of people did see "a rather strange, erratically-moving light that evening about dusk," but never saw anything he felt he would want to call "a flying saucer." But when he got back to Pratt, his boss wanted to know where he had been. "Chuck had been having a cookout in his backyard that night for friends, and they all said this big craft appeared right over them and just hovered there awhile before streaking off. I was chasing ghosts and had the real thing literally in my publisher's backyard." But in his first newspaper job, Moore encountered two problems: alcohol and an abusive stepfather. He's more willing to talk about the alcohol. "I didn't really drink much - I just couldn't hold my liquor well, probably because I didn't drink. The alcohol demon in my family was really my stepfather's. We had a New Year's or Christmas party in 1965 I think at the local country club for the paper and its advertisers. I kept going back to the punch bowl and I got really shit-faced, I guess. I remember on the way home, it was raining just a little, and before I ever got out of the country club parking lot, I sideswiped Roy's car - he was our sports editor, nice guy. I kept going, figuring in my drunken state, aww, that don't look too bad. We'll talk about it tomorrow. "Then, not 10-15 blocks from home, I came up to a stop sign and skidded into the car in front me. I wasn't going very fast at all. My tires slid on the wet pavement. The other car pulled up a little and as it went around the corner and stopped, I didn't see any damage - so I just kept going and made it home. The car belonged to the owners of the local Jett's Department Store - one of our biggest advertisers. I caught holy hell at work the next day and deserved every bit of it." As for the other demon, he will only say that his stepfather was "a pervert" who'd be locked away for life if he were around today. "I have three sisters and I guess they're all still alive, so I won't go into any details, but he had sexually molested all of them. My sisters and mother had moved away to a little town called Sterling, where she was - in her 30's - trying to get her college degree and escape her own hell. For some reason, one of my sisters was still with my stepdad. She called me and begged me to come and rescue her, that he was trying to rape her. I got her out through a window that night and hid her in my own apartment. He was looking for her and wanted to file kidnapping charges against me. He backed down, but it was a time in my life that my expenses exceeded my income." He says he was in a nearby town, Kingman, when he had a blowout and had to write a bad check to get a new tire. The check got to the bank before he did and he was arrested on a bad check warrant, and put up in jail right across the street from the newspaper. "Marsha, one of our reporters, bailed me out. It was an embarrassment to everyone and I was on my way out. I blame no one but myself." 'World Traveler' Gets Grounded With two friends, both named Jim (one Jim Swindler), he pre-enlisted in the Air Force. They had three months or so before having to report for duty, so they took off in Moore's 1958 Chevy to "see the world" or at least the American part of it. It was winter and one of the boys had a friend in Illinois they would stay with first. On their very first night, in some of the worst freeze that part of Illinois had ever seen, the house caught fire. "Somehow after it was all over, everyone was gone but Jim Swindler and me. We tried to sleep in my car because it was too icy to even get to the road. We froze our butts off and ended up with our socking feet stuck up each other's armpits to keep from freezing. It was a helluva night and no way to start what was supposed to be a lark." They parted in, he thinks, Galesburg where Jim Swindler found a temporary job. Moore wanted to go on to Chicago, and the two planned to reunite in three months at enlistment headquarters. They never saw each other again. Moore failed the physical because of an infected ingrown toenail, and ended up working at the Naperville Sun. "It was a terrible place for me. The publisher, Harold White, really had a grudge toward a local politician and I was expected to find the dirt on him to ruin him. I couldn't find it, and I was beginning to get disturbed that I was spending my life doing nothing but trying to ruin a man I didn't even know. I started laying out of work. I was becoming catatonic, sleeping all day and all night. I can't explain what I was going through, but I had to leave." He went to Chicago in search of fame and fortune - and promptly got thrown in jail, accusing of robbing a bank in Peoria. NEXT: THE MAFIA-KENNEDY YEARS |
Jim
Moore dropped out of the University of Kansas in 1964 and went to a
work with a traveling group of magazine salespeople.
Meeting
Miss America