JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

A first clue to Thomas Arthur Vallee’s connections with intelligence agencies was the New York license plate on the 1962 Ford Falcon he was driving: 31-10RF.[151] A few days after President Kennedy’s assassination, NBC News in Chicago learned about Vallee’s arrest on the same day President Kennedy had been scheduled to come to Chicago. Luke Christopher Hester, an NBC Chicago employee, asked his father-in-law, Hugh Larkin, a retired New York City police officer, to check on Vallee’s license plate. Larkin asked his old friends in the New York Police Department if they would run a background check on it. They came back to Larkin saying the license plate information was “frozen,” and that “only the FBI could obtain this information.”[152] NBC News got no further. The registration for the license plate on the car Thomas Arthur Vallee was driving at the time of his arrest was classified—restricted to U.S. intelligence agencies.