The following is from Edward Jay Epstein's COUNTERPLOT, pp. 187-189. It details one of Jim Garrison's most impressive talents. He was a noted cryptographer! ---------------------------------------------------------------- A discovery that Jones Harris made while we were going through the papers provided considerable insight into the nature of Garrison's investigation. What Harris found was a five-digit number that was common to both Shaw's and Oswald's address books. The entry in Shaw's book was "Lee Odom, PO Box 19106, Dallas, Tex." In Oswald's book, the number 19106 was preceded by the Cyrillic letters [DD]; (which, like other Russian letters on the page, the Warren Commission had assumed were made during Oswald's two-and-a-half-year stay in the Soviet Union). Though the coincidence of numbers proved nothing in itself, it was striking, and Garrison decided that further investigation was merited. Shortly thereafter, Garrison announced to the press that he had found the entry "PO 19106" in both Oswald's and Shaw's address books, and that the number was a "nonexistent or fictional number," which removed "the possibility of coincidence." Moreover, Garrison said that "PO 19106" was a code that, when deciphered, produced Jack Ruby's unlisted telephone number, WH 1-5601, and "no other number on earth." The method by which Garrison "deciphered" the code is worth following. Starting with the "scrambled" number 19106, Garrison "unscrambled" it (by choosing the nearest digit, then the farthest, then the next nearest, etc.) to produce the number 16901. Ruby's number was 15601, so by unscrambling the digits Garrison managed to match the last two digits in the two numbers. The next step was to subtract the arbitrary number 1300 from 16901, and presto 15601. Finally, Garrison converted the prefix "PO" to "WH" by a system that, according to the prominent cryptographer Irwin Mann, yields at least six different prefixes: Garrison chose Ruby's. A few days after Garrison announced that he had deciphered the code, it became known that the number 19106 in Shaw's address book was by no means "nonexistent or fictional." PO Box 19106 had been, as Shaw's address book indicated, the address in Dallas of a man named Lee Odom. Odom stated that he had been introduced to Shaw in 1966 by the manager of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, and had briefly discussed with Shaw the possibility of bringing bloodless bullfights to New Orleans; he had left his business address--PO Box 19106, Dallas, Texas--with Shaw. In fact, Odom's post-office box could not possibly have been the number in Oswald's book, because the post office-box number 19106 did not exist in Dallas before it was assigned to Odom, in 1965--long after Oswald's death, in 1963. It was clear that Garrison had done some questionable interpolating of his own in moving from a coincidence to a conspiracy. First, he had told newsmen that the number in Oswald's book was PO 19106, although in fact it was [DD] 19106. (When a television interviewer later asked him how he had determined that the prefix was PO, rather than [DD], he answered, with perfect aplomb, "More or less by looking at it.") Then, without first checking with the Dallas post office whether in fact such an address existed, he had announced that the post office-box number was fictional. And, finally, he had converted the number in Shaw's book into Jack Ruby's phone number by rearranging the digits, subtracting an arbitrary number, and changing the letters "PO" to "WH." Garrison had constructed a piece of evidence against Clay Shaw and had disclosed it to the press. Yet the District Attorney did not seem particularly perturbed when questions were raised about the logic of his deductions. When he was asked on a local television show how the number of a post-office box that didn't exist until 1965 could have been used to represent Jack Ruby's phone number in 1963, he replied, "Well, that's a problem for you to think over, because you obviously missed the point." Indeed, Garrison counterattacked in a press conference, saying, "We are very interested in knowing who introduced Mr. Odom to Mr. Shaw, how many bullfights Mr. Odom has actually produced"--as if this fact were relevant to his investigation-- and, "We are particularly interested in clarifying now why there is also coded in Lee Oswald's address book the local phone number of the Central Intelligence Agency." Using an entirely different system of decipherment -- multiplying the number by 10, rearranging the digits, subtracting 1700, and remultiplying--Garrison managed to convert the number 1147, which appeared in Oswald's book, to 522-8874, the CIA's phone number. Oswald's codes were "subjective," Garrison said, in that they varied from number to number. There seemed little point in Oswald's having gone through such an elaborate procedure, however, because the CIA number that Garrison referred to was--and is--listed in the New Orleans telephone book.