Post by John Duncan on Nov 20, 2020 22:06:03 GMT -5
November 1963
By Gil Jesus
At the end of October, the Chicago Secret Service received an FBI teletype detailing a plot by four Cuban gunmen to kill Kennedy in Chicago with "high-powered rifles" during a motorcade. The President was scheduled to visit there on November 2nd to attend an Army-Navy football game. Two suspects were arrested and detained by the Secret Service in Chicago on November 1st.
That same day, Thomas Arthur Vallee, a vocal Kennedy critic and member of the John Birch Society, was arrested by the Secret Service in Chicago after a search of the vehicle he was driving revealed that he had an M-1 rifle, a handgun and three thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee had asked his employer for the day of Kennedy's motorcade off. When arrested, he had been driving a car with New York plates, number 311-ORF. Kennedy's Chicago trip was cancelled, and Vallee was released on November 2nd. The significance of Vallee's arrest was that he had a military rifle which probably had been stolen from a military installation. More on that later.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for JFK's plan to support a bloodless coup in Saigon. Ambassador Lodge was operating on his own, not communicating to the President what was happening there. Although Kennedy had supported a change in the South Vietnamese government, he had also attempted to see that the Diem brothers received safe passage out of the country by supplying a plane which would fly them to exile in Yugoslavia. Officially, they were to attend a meeting of the Inter-Paliamentary Union in Belgrade.
Once the Diem brothers were safely out of the country, the coup would take place and the American Government would recognize the government of South Vietnam. That was the plan that Kennedy had authorized.
On the day of the arrest of the Bircher Thomas Vallee in Chicago, Hosty was ordered to locate the whereabouts of "George Perrel". Apparently, the weapons found in Vallee's possession had some connection with this man. Perrel, whose real name was Fermin de Goicochea Sanchez. He was a key participant in the planning of a "second Cuban invasion" during the last week in November. A veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Sanchez was the "secretary of military affairs" of the DRE. He was also a student at the U.of D., whose president from 1960 to 1962, Robert Morris, was a high ranking member of the John Birch Society and an associate of Texas oilman H. L. Hunt.
Lee Harvey Oswald was not one of them.
By Gil Jesus
At the end of October, the Chicago Secret Service received an FBI teletype detailing a plot by four Cuban gunmen to kill Kennedy in Chicago with "high-powered rifles" during a motorcade. The President was scheduled to visit there on November 2nd to attend an Army-Navy football game. Two suspects were arrested and detained by the Secret Service in Chicago on November 1st.
That same day, Thomas Arthur Vallee, a vocal Kennedy critic and member of the John Birch Society, was arrested by the Secret Service in Chicago after a search of the vehicle he was driving revealed that he had an M-1 rifle, a handgun and three thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee had asked his employer for the day of Kennedy's motorcade off. When arrested, he had been driving a car with New York plates, number 311-ORF. Kennedy's Chicago trip was cancelled, and Vallee was released on November 2nd. The significance of Vallee's arrest was that he had a military rifle which probably had been stolen from a military installation. More on that later.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for JFK's plan to support a bloodless coup in Saigon. Ambassador Lodge was operating on his own, not communicating to the President what was happening there. Although Kennedy had supported a change in the South Vietnamese government, he had also attempted to see that the Diem brothers received safe passage out of the country by supplying a plane which would fly them to exile in Yugoslavia. Officially, they were to attend a meeting of the Inter-Paliamentary Union in Belgrade.
Once the Diem brothers were safely out of the country, the coup would take place and the American Government would recognize the government of South Vietnam. That was the plan that Kennedy had authorized.
The South Vietnamese military and the American Embassy, however, had other plans. Those plans included the elimination of Diem and his brother Nhu, who had planned to kill some of the American officials during a fake Vietcong uprising. The "uprising" was then to be put down by Diem's forces, to show the Kennedy Administration that it indeed had a friend in Diem. The problem with Diem's plan was that he had worked it out with the head of his military, General Don, who was also in charge of the miltary coup with the Americans against him. Don informed officials at the American Embassy, who plotted with him to allow the brothers to believe that the fake uprising would proceed.
The brothers were driven to the airport at Tan Son Nhut and boarded the plane. Once aboard the plane, they received word of the "uprising". They left the plane as the Americans did nothing to stop them. They got into their limousine and sped off back to the Presidential Palace, only to find it empty when they got there.
Realizing that they had been had, the brothers tried to escape by fleeing through a tunnel which had been dug to Cholon, but Don's forces were waiting for them, loaded them into a van and subsequently murdered them. A cable from Saigon was handed to Kennedy, a lie which said that the brothers had committed suicide. Two days later, Kennedy received word from a source who had examined the bodies that both brothers had been shot in the nape of the neck and that Diem's body had shown signs of having been beaten up. When he received this news, Kennedy leapt to his feet, with a look of shock and dismay on his face. He was somber and shaken. He had personally stayed on top of this coup and had ordered it to be bloodless. In addition, he had been duped once again by his own people, this time in Saigon, first by allowing Diem and Nhu to leave the plane, and then lying to Kennedy that they had committed suicide. "He (Diem) fought for his country for twenty years," said Kennedy, "it should not have ended like this."
After receiving the order to locate "Perrel", Hosty went looking for Oswald. He needed someone who could infiltrate the Cuban exile - gunrunning clique to find "Perrel" and determine what his game was.
Registering at an apartment house under the name O.H.Lee, Oswald had effectively "slipped through the cracks" and his residence was unknown to the FBI. Hosty visited the Paine residence on November 1st, to question Oswald's wife Marina and Ruth Paine to find out if they knew where Oswald was living. Although they did not know, Hosty (after threatening Marina with deportation) was able to find out that Oswald was employed at the School Book Depository. Hosty called the School Book Depository to find out if Oswald was, indeed, employed there and found out that he was. He also found out that the address that Oswald had given the Depository was the Paine residence, where he knew Oswald was not living.
After several days, Hosty returned to the Paine home to find out if Ruth Paine or Marina were able to find out where he was living.
Neither knew, but Mrs. Paine had the phone number of the place where he was staying and knew it was in Oak Cliff. If Hosty were any kind of investigator, he would have contacted the Phone Co. to determine the address of that phone number. Having done that, he would have known exactly where Oswald was staying.
During the weeks prior to the assassination, "truckloads" of weapons had been stolen from Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, with the cooperation of ordnance officer George Nonte. The stolen weapons were "fenced" through a Dallas gun shop owner named John Thomas Masen to Perrel and other Cuban exile groups. This was done with the knowledge of the FBI, as Nonte was an FBI informant, collecting information on the "second Cuban invasion" for the Bureau.
Eleven of those stolen weapons, however, ended up in an armory in Terrell, Texas. I submit to the reader that the "second Cuban invasion" scheduled for the "last week in November" was nothing of the sort, but a "cover" to acquire a cache of weapons that would be used to kill Kennedy at some future point in time. The "last week in November" was precisely within the time frame (November 28th ) that Eugene Dinkin had warned Kennedy would be killed. During the first Cuban invasion, Castro was to be killed.
This time it would be Kennedy.
On November 6th, Dinkin walked into the U.N. Press Office in Geneva, Switzerland and told a stringer for Time-Life that "they" were plotting against Kennedy and that "something" would happen in Texas. The information was forwarded to U.S. military authorities, the FBI and the CIA.
Several days after Hosty's second visit to the Paine residence and Dinkin's Geneva revelation of a plot against Kennedy in Texas, Oswald walked into the Dallas FBI office looking for Hosty who was not there at the time. He left a note warning Hosty to stay away from his family and if he had any "questions" he should ask Oswald directly. The contents of the note, if true, implied that Oswald was indeed an FBI informant and that by November 9th, Hosty knew how to contact Oswald directly, and Oswald knew that he knew.
On November 4th, Robert Kennedy received a letter from Byron Skelton, a Democratic Committeeman from Texas, asking that Dallas be dropped from the President's itinerary because "they" would kill him there. Citing a prominent Dallas resident's pronouncement that Kennedy was a "liablility to the free world", Skelton believed that such a man was capable of doing the President harm, and observing the attitude in preparations for the President's trip, he simply felt that it was not safe to go there. Skelton felt so passionately about bypassing Dallas that he flew to Washington to plead his case.
Even Governor Connally tried to talk the President out of a stop in Dallas, saying that the people might be "too emotional".
On November 14th, an "unnamed subject" who had been arrested in Piedras Negras, Mexico on September 30th for stealing three cars, told the FBI "that he is a member of th Ku Klux Klan and that his sources have told him that a militant group of the National States Rights Party plans to assassinate the president and other high-level officials. He stated that he does not believe that this is planned for the near future, but he does believe the attempt will be made ." The Secret Service was advised "telephonically" by the FBI of the above information the following day, but according to the Secret Service report, the FBI's Washington D.C. headquarters downplayed the information saying that "the subject was attempting to make a deal with them" on the car theft charges he faced and that "no information was developed that would indicate any danger to the President...during his trip to Dallas".
Hoover was downplaying the threat to assure the Secret Service that no additional steps were needed to protect the President in Dallas. In other words, the Secret Service had his approval.
Two days later, Oswald met with Hosty and told him that he had developed information that the theft of the weapons at Fort Hood was connected to a Cuban exile attempt to kill the President and that that attempt would be made at the Trade Mart.
Several hours after Oswald's meeting with Hosty on the 16th of November, Hoover sent out a teletype to all FBI offices notifying them that "information has been received by the bureau that a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas November 22-23 1963. All receiving offices should immmediately contact all CIs (Criminal Informants), PCIs (Potential Criminal Informants), logical Race and Hate groups (KKK, NSRP, Nazis) and determine if any basis for threats. Bureau should be kept advised of all developements by teletype." In other words, no written reports: notify the Bureau by teletype. If the information was found to be true, it would end up in the hands of Hoover, who would make sure that the Secret Service would not be warned.
Meanwhile, threats to kill Kennedy were coming into the Miami Police Department prior to JFK's November 18th visit there.
On November 9, 1963, Miami Police informant Willie Somerset recorded a breakfast meeting with his friend Joseph Milteer, who outlined the assassination of President Kennedy. Milteer was taped by Somerset as he spoke of Kennedy's coming visit to Miami on November 18th:
Somerset: " I think Kennedy is coming here on the 18th to make some kind of speech. I imagine it will be on TV."
Milteer: "You can bet your bottom dollar that he (JFK) is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans, there are so many of them here."
Somerset: "Yeah, well, he'll have a thousand bodyguards. Don't worry about that."
Milteer: "The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get to him."
Somerset: "Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?"
Milteer: "From an office building with a high-powered rifle."
Somerset: "Do you think he knows he's a marked man?"
Milteer: "Sure he does."
Somerset: "Are they really going to kill him?"
Milteer: "Oh, yeah, it's in the works. Brown (Jack Brown, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) himself, Brown is just as likely to get him as anybody in the world. He hasn't said so, but he's tried to get Martin Luther King, Jr."
Prodded for more information, Milteer continues:
Milteer: "Disassemble a gun. You don't have to take a gun up there, you can take it up in pieces. All those guns come knock down, you can take them apart."
Somerset: "Boy if that Kennedy gets shot, we have to know where we are at. Because you know that will be a real shake.."
Milteer: (An investigation) would leave no stone unturned there, no way. They will pick up somebody within hours afterward....just to throw the public off."
Somerset: "Oh, somebody is going to go to jail if he gets killed."
Milteer: "Just like Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case, you know."
Somerset asked when such an assassination would take place, to which Milteer replied:
"It's in the works....there ain't any countdown to it. We have just got to be sitting on go. Countdown, they can move in on you, and on go they can't. Countdown is alright for a slow, prepared operation. But in an emergency situation, you have got to be sitting on go."
Some fives years after Kennedy's murder, Milteer also expressed specific knowledge of murder plots against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Captain Charles Sapp of the Miami Police Intelligence Bureau was concerned enough with Milteer's remark about the President's assassination being "in the works" to notify both the FBI and the Secret Service of the threat. Miami Police provided both agencies with copies of the taped conversation two weeks before the assassination.
Despite the fact that this threat was perceived as significant, both the FBI and the Secret Service failed to pass the information on to those responsible for the President's Dallas trip.
Kennedy visited Miami as scheduled on November 18th, but as a result of the taped information provided by the Miami Police and their fear of trouble from anti-Castro exiles, he was flown in to a scheduled speech by helicopter instead.
The Miami police had received word of a threat by a "mobile, unidentified gunman with a high-powered rifle fitted with a scope". In addition, an anonymous typed postcard dated 11/16/63 and sent to the Chief of Police said that the "Cuban Commandos have the bombs ready for killing JFK" and that they'd use them either "at the airport or the convention hall".
In addition, the Secret Service received an "organized crime" threat pertaining to the same (11/18) trip.
Tampa police reported that they had received a threat from someone they describe as a "white male age 20 slender in build, etc." A Nov. 8 memo from the Secret Service indicated that the original threat had been made in October and that "subject stated he will use a gun, and if he couldn't get closer he would find some other way. Chief of Police J.M.Mullins said that three people had made threats against the President, and although one was still in jail at the time of the president's visit, he did not know if the other two had followed the presidential caravan to Dallas.
The Dallas papers announced that the motorcade route most likely would "move west on Main St. through the downtown area." However, the Chief of the Secret Service, Forrest Sorrels, made a slight change in the route: a right hand turn which would put the motorcade north on Houston St., and a left-hand turn onto Elm St. The purpose of the change was to obtain access to Stemmons Freeway. The route change was communicated to both Dallas papers, which published the amended route on Tuesday, November 19th.
Dallas was a dangerous place in 1963, especially for Kennedy, who had been branded a traitor and a coward for his handling of both the Bay of Pigs failure and the Cuban Missle Crisis. The danger lay with radical conservatives, whose passions included the love of guns and the regular use of them.
Dallas extremists tended to concentrate more on what they perceived as the enemy in Washington rather than the enemy in the Kremlin. They believed that the real threat to America was an internal one, with the President the target, not only because he appeased the Kremlin, but even joined with the Negroes pressing for equality.
Powerful men, like H.L. Hunt and General Walker were inciting the most deadly forces. At a dinner party, Hunt was overheard by witnesses to say that "the only way to get those traitors (the Kennedys) out of the government was to shoot them out." He made a speech in Houston calling the Kennedy Administration a "Communist Government." Members of the civic leadership and federal judges and attorneys, urged the planners of the trip to call it off. The city harbored too much resentment toward Washington in general and toward the President in particular.
The danger couldn't be exaggerated. The fact was driven home time and time again.
Senators were prominent among those who urged Kennedy not to go to Texas and especially not to Dallas. In October 1963, J.William Fulbright (D-Ark) made it plain that Kennedy should go nowhere near the city, especially after the Dallas Morning News had attacked the president rather fiercely in an editorial for his insufficient opposition to communist aggression. The editorial's vehemence reflected the depths of loathing Kennedy could expect there. "Dallas is a dangerous place", he told Kennedy, "I wouldn't go there. Don't YOU go there". Seven weeks earlier, Fulbright had virtually pleaded with the president to skip Dallas, saying that any political gain was not worth the risk.
Adlai Stevenson had urged a fundamental reconsideration of the trip after right-wing extremists spat on him and struck him with a sign on October 24th in Dallas. This was the second embarrassing attack on a politician from the extremists in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson and his wife were attacked by a mob of Nixon supporters in 1960, not the least of which was Congressman Bruce Alger, the only Republican congressman from Texas, who held a sign that said, "LBJ sold out to to the Yankee Socialists". Stanley Marcus, head of the well-known Neiman Marcus retail company, pleaded with Kennedy not to come to Dallas. Marcus was with Stevenson when the U.N. ambassador was attacked in October.
After Marcus shoved Stevenson into the back seat of the car, the mob started rocking the car side to side. The driver gunned it and almost killed someone in an attempt to get away. So Marcus knew the hatred that Dallas had.
Private citizens echoed these warnings throughout October and November.
Anne Brinkley, wife of newscaster David Brinkley, delivered her warning the evening before the trip to Texas.
A Dallas woman told Kennedy's Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, "Don't let him come down here...I think something terrible is going to happen to him ".
In the early morning hours of November 20, 1963, a drug addict and prostitute named Rose Cheramie was found lying on the side of the road near Eunice, Louisiana. She had been thrown from a moving car.
Battered and bruised and in a state of near hysteria, she was transported to Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson. She appeared to be under the influence of some drug. State Police Lieutenant Francis Fruge, investigating the incident, asked her what had happened. She told him that she had been travelling from Florida to Dallas with two Latin men. When he asked he what they were going to do in Dallas, she replied, "pick up some money, pick up my baby and ....kill Kennedy."
At the State Hospital, she repeated her claim to the doctors several times, saying that the President would be murdered in two days and said that she got her information from "word in the underworld". But because of her emotional state at the time, she was thought to be in a drug-induced delirium and her story was not believed.
That same day, Robert Kennedy informed Ramsey Clark of his misgivings about his brother's upcoming trip to Texas. "I don't want him to go", RFK said. He had good reason to fear for the president's safety. He had received a letter from an anonymous writer from Texas warning him not to let the president go to Dallas because "they" would kill him there. It is not clear who "they" were.
November 22, 1963
The Texas visit, which had begun the day before, was a major story in the state. The Dallas area stations were mindful of the strong conservative and right-wing elements in the community. JFK's was the first Presidential visit to the city since 1948 and the three local stations, mindful of the significance of the President's visit and of the possibility of some sort of incident, decided to pool their resources for saturation coverage. The largest saturation of news coverage was slated for Love Field, as this was considered by news directors to be the most likely place for a protest or incident against the President.
Some commentators even brought up the subject of assassination.
KTVT announcer Ed Herbert, who just prior to the President's arrival at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast, in mentioning the circumstances leading up to the assassination of William McKinley, said, "...As many important occasions in the world, no one seemed to sense that anything different was going to happen."
The peacemaker had come to "nut country" to quell the "dissident voices" of those extremists who found "fault but never favor", including those voices "preaching doctrines...that peace is a sign of weakness. He would tell them that they "fear the hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies". He would express his hope that "fewer people will listen to nonsense".
"Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future", he would say. He would tell Dallas of the nation's strength, reminding his audience that "the United States is a peaceful nation" and that its strength "will never be used in aggressive ambitions" nor would it be used to "promote provocations".
This was JFK's speech to be given at the Dallas Trade Mart.
According to Gus Russo, about 25,000 threats were reportedly logged during Kennedy's 34 months in office. Most of them made by crackpots, but some by potentially real assassins. In 1976, the Secret Service released a report indicating that its "Security Index" listed one million people as potential threats to President Kennedy at the time of his death.