JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
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president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through th...
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It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms became this invisible government’s immediate commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the existence of this top-secret intelligence network, much less the identity of its deep-cover bureaucrats. These CIA “f...
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Its Dulles-appointed members would act quickly, with total obedience, when called on by the CIA to ...
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To Lodge’s incessant question, “What do you propose to do for us?” Diem’s very genuine response was: “I will not serve.” He was not going to bow and scrape in front of the Americans.
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Lodge was convinced that Diem was “simply unbelievably stubborn,” as he told Rusk earlier in his report. Lodge was like a Southern landowner dismissing a nonconforming black sharecropper as “stubborn.” So Lodge thought Diem must have meant to say, “I will not give in,” rather than “I will not serve.” Stubbornness, not principle, was what Lodge was prepared to deal with in terms of the “chicken” metaphor, or head-on crash scenario, that he was following in his strategy toward Diem.
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He thought the United States’ client ruler was being “simply, unbelievably stubborn” in not backing down from “totalitarian acts which a...
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Yet Diem was in fact preparing to back away from just such acts, as shown by his government’s...
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UN Fact-Finding Mission. Nevertheless, he refused to serve unconditionally the imperial interests of the...
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Vietnamese people could do odd things if they were resentful (an attitude Diem had increasingly in common with Ho Chi Minh)—which Lodge again failed to understand. He thought Diem could only have meant all along that he would not give in, not that there was something deeper at stake.
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Even in Lodge’s own description of their conversation, it was Diem who spoke more to the point. Diem said bluntly, “The CIA is intriguing against the Government of Vietnam.”
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Lodge, who was directing the CIA’s communications with the generals plotting against Diem, said in response (presumably with a straight face): “Give me proof of improper action by any employee of the U.S. ...
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On a more practical note, Lodge told the State Department: “As to requests from the Generals, they may well have need of funds at the last moment with which to buy off potential opposition. To the extent that these funds can be passed discreetly, I believe we should furnish them . . .”[128]
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Abraham Bolden was one of the
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agents present. Bolden had left the White House detail voluntarily
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I know former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. Between 1998 and 2004, I interviewed him on seven distinct visits to his South Side Chicago home.[129] I hope my brief narration can do justice to the story of Abraham Bolden—and of his wife, Barbara Louise Bolden, who at the age of seventy died at home from an asthma attack on December 27, 2005.[130] With the help of their faith, the love of their family and friends, and the writings of a few supportive researchers, Abraham and Barbara Bolden survived truthfully for decades the retaliation of a
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systemic evil that goes beyond the imagination of most Americans.[131]
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The FBI had said “the suspects were rightwing para-military fanatics.” The assassination “would probably be attempted at one of the Northwest Expressway overpasses.” They knew this from an informant named “Lee.”[134] Who was the informant named “Lee”? Could it have been Lee Harvey Oswald? We will return to that question.
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The FBI told Martineau everything was now up to the Secret Service. James Rowley, head of the Secret Service in Washington, confirmed to Martineau that J. Edgar Hoover had passed the buck. It was the Secret Service’s jurisdiction. The FBI would do nothing to investigate or stop the plot against Kennedy.[136]
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headquarters early Friday morning. Through the early morning hours, J. Lloyd Stocks questioned one of the two men, while his fellow agent Robert Motto questioned the other. The two suspects, who have remained anonymous to this day, stonewalled the questions.[140] In the meantime, their two reported collaborators remained at large. President Kennedy was due to arrive the next day for his motorcade through the streets of Chicago.
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“Please tell President Kennedy that I am a good and a frank ally, that I would rather be frank and settle questions now than talk about them after we have lost everything.”
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Thomas Arthur Vallee would have likely become notorious as the president’s presumed assassin. For in the Chicago plot to kill Kennedy, Thomas Arthur Vallee was chosen for the same scapegoat role that Lee Harvey Oswald would play three weeks later in Dallas.
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Thomas Arthur Vallee was quickly identified from intelligence sources as an ex-Marine who was a “disaffiliated member of the
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John Birch Society,”[146] a far right organization obsessed with Communist subversion in the United States. Vallee was also described as a loner, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a gun collector. He fit perfectly the “lone nut” profile that would later be used to characterize ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.
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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 ...more
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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.
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The two Chicago police officers who arrested Vallee, Daniel Groth and Peter Schurla, were themselves destined for prominent role...
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Vallee’s arrest, Schurla was a high-level intelligence official at Chicago police headquarters.[153] His companion Daniel Groth’s career in intelligence had by then become...
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At 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, six years after the arrest of Thomas Arthur Vallee, Sergeant Daniel Groth commanded the police team that broke into the Chicago apartment of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The heavily armed officers shot both men to death.[154] In 1983 the Black Panther survivors of the raid and the families of Hampton and Clark were awarded $1.85 million in a lawsuit against federal, state...
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officers had carried out the assault on Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the specific...
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Northeastern Illinois University professor Dan Stern researched Daniel Groth’s background. He discovered that Groth had taken several lengthy “training leaves” from the Chicago Police Department to Washington, D.C., where Stern and other researchers believed Groth “underwent specialized counterintelligence training under the auspices of both the FBI and the CIA.”[157] According to Stern, “Groth never had a normal [Chicago] police assignment, but was deployed all along in a counterintelligence capacity,” with an early f...
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and that while technically a member of the Chicago police, Daniel Groth probably worked under cover for the CIA.[159] When a journalist confronted Groth and asked him point-blank...
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Thomas Vallee had been led along a trail that Lee Oswald would follow after him. In his most revealing interview, Vallee told investigative reporter Edwin Black that he had been assigned by the Marines to a U-2 base in Japan, Camp Otsu.[172] Vallee thereby came under the control of the Central
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Intelligence Agency, which commanded the U-2, just as Oswald would come under the CIA’s control as a radar operator at another CIA U-2 base in Japan.
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Vallee also told Black that he later worked with the CIA at a camp near Levittown, Long Island, helping to train Cuban exiles to assassinate Fidel Castro.[173] Oswald participated in a CIA training camp with Cuban exiles by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans.[174] Vallee’s close CIA connections, like Oswald’s, help to explain how he, too, came to be employed at a site over a presidential parade route. Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald, two men under ...
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“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.”[208]
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But again, as in the Bay of Pigs, he blamed the CIA for manipulation, and in this case, assassination. In his anger at the CIA’s behind-the-scenes role in the deaths of Diem and Nhu, he said to his friend Senator George Smathers, “I’ve got to do something about those bastards.” He told Smathers that “they should be stripped of their exorbitant power.”[211] He was echoing his statement after the Bay of Pigs that he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”[212]
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“we have lost ground in Africa because we have neglected and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African people.”[217] It is noteworthy that in the index to his 1960 campaign speeches, there are 479 references to Africa.[218]
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The CIA succeeded in having Lumumba killed in haste by Belgian collaborators three days before Kennedy took his oath of office.
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Bolden explained later to House investigators, was to sequester the Chicago plot
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When Bolden returned to his office, he raised the question with his fellow Secret Service agents about the obvious connections between the Chicago plot and the president’s murder that afternoon in Dallas only three weeks later. Most of the agents agreed that they were connected.[231] However, Special Agent In Charge Martineau was quick to shut down any office discussion linking Chicago on November 2 and Dallas on November 22. He told his staff what to believe: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. There was no connection with
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Chicago. Forget November 2 in Chicago.[232]
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In January 1964, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of ordering all its agents to turn in their identification booklets for replacements. Secret Service agents carried small, passport-size booklets holding their identification, known as “commission books.” When the order came down requiring each agent to be re-photographed and provided with a newly engraved commission book, Bolden suspected that Secret Service credentials had been used ...
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In a second trial before Judge Perry on August 12, 1964, Abraham Bolden was convicted on all three counts. The prosecution’s case featured testimony by indicted counterfeiter Joseph Spagnoli. In his own later trial for counterfeiting, held before the same Judge Perry, Spagnoli shocked the court by confessing on the witness stand that he had perjured himself when he testified against Bolden.[238] He said Prosecutor Richard Sikes had told him he should lie.[239]
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committed Bolden to a psychiatric unit. A prison official told him, “You won’t know who you are any more when we get through with you.”[242] He was given mind-numbing drugs. Fortunately other prisoners showed him how to fake swallowing the pills. As his situation worsened, Bolden sent the sign-marked letter to his lawyer, who alerted Barbara Bolden. She went immediately to the prison, where she objected strenuously to her husband’s treatment.[243] “She saved my life,” Mr. Bolden said repeatedly in my visits with him and Mrs. Bolden, referring especially to her persistent intercession on his ...more
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The FBI’s informant, “Lee,” had somehow made the federal security system work in Chicago as it was supposed to work. “Lee” had whistled the key information on the plot far enough into the system for it to function in Chicago as it was meant to function, in spite of the plotters’ control over major components of the system. It was as if the security alarm bells that the FBI’s Marvin Gheesling had
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The Secret Service investigation that disrupted the Chicago plot to kill President Kennedy should have disrupted the Dallas plot as well. The central elements were the same in both places: a sniper team waiting in the shadows, complemented by a CIA-connected, “lone nut” patsy positioned in a building directly over the motorcade route. What the Secret Service discovered in Chicago should have made impossible what was then done copycat fashion in Dallas.
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They placed a blanket over Chicago. They smothered the possible pre-assassination testimony of witnesses such as Abraham Bolden, whose whistleblowing, like that of “Lee,” if heard, could have brought the president’s security system to life again. The failed plot’s total cover-up within the government’s police agencies made possible its success the second time around.
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The anonymous police detectives and federal agents who informed the media after Dallas of Vallee’s arrest in Chicago one month earlier never mentioned the Secret Service’s detention and questioning of the two suspected snipers. After November 2, 1963, they and their two unapprehended comrades in arms
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vanished without a trace of their existence. The Dallas plot was then allowed to unfold smoothly, as if it had no Chicago paradigm. Higher orders ensured the necessary amnesia. A Treasury Department official ordered Chicago Police Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland to forget his encounter with Thomas Arthur Vallee. Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau sent the top-secret report of the four-man sniper team to Washington headquarters, where it was made inaccessible. But even that subterranean existence of the Chicago report created a problem for the Secret Service three decades ...more
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Assassination Records Review Board requested acce...
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