The Kennedy Detail - Kelly's Review

 

The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin

– By William Kelly (Billkelly3@gmail.com)

The Kennedy Detail – JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence by Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin and a foreword by Clint Hill (Gallery/Simon & Schuster, 2010, 427 p.).

Gerald Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail (TKD) is a significant and insightful account of some of the men who were entrusted with the sacred responsibility of protecting the life of the President and failed. They failed to protect the President, failed to determine the truth as to what happened in Dallas, and now they fail to exonerate themselves and their agency for their dereliction of duty and the perversion of the truth.

The Kennedy Detail is an important new book because it’s an insider’s account of the activities of the Kennedy administration, reveals some Secret Service protocols, provides evidence of conspiracy and details how and why those agents failed to protect Kennedy. It does so while at the same time “CTA,” as former Agent Abraham Bolden puts it - covers their ass.

It is from a study of the Secret Service protocols and activities that we come to an understanding of how the assassination was allowed to occur, and from the personal interactions between the Kennedy family and the men who failed to protect his life, why it was allowed to happen.

Apparently the manuscript was not officially previewed and approved by the government censors since the book reveals Protective Research Section (PRS) protocols (See: PRS & DPD), previously unknown names behind the Secret Service codes for radio communications (1), rejects the official Warren Commission conclusion regarding the Single-Bullet-Theory (2), promotes convincing evidence of a shot from the front (3), and reveals that Agent Blaine kept copies of the advance reports that were supposed to have been intentionally destroyed and no longer exist. (4)

What I want to know is how come these issues don’t get any headlines in the mainstream media?

Instead we get the spin on how the President ordered the agents off the bumper of the limo, thus blaming the victim for his own murder (5), and Agent Blaine’s acknowledgement that he almost accidentally shot LBJ at his DC residence on the night of the assassination (6), both of which are non-issues, but the only ones that have thus far made news headlines. (7)

I would think that the agents bucking the official party line on the “Single-Bullet-Theory,” saying there is evidence of a shot from the front (“fist sized hole in back of head”), and being in possession of official records thought to have been destroyed would make much better headlines.

Some of these issues are also dealt with in the Discovery Channel documentary based on this book (8), as well as an hour long discussion Gerald Blaine, Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin had with Gary Mack at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas which was taped and aired on CSPAN, and where my suspicion that the manuscript was not previewed by the government was confirmed. (9)

But The Kennedy Detail isn’t just about the assassination of the President, it also gives a good, overall, general impression of what it was like to protect, or at least try to protect a popular president who had also irritated the most radical right wing conservatives in the country –extremists who physically threatened him, and eventually killed him, so they didn’t have an easy job.

This isn’t the first time agents have “broken their silence” and talked, as many agents talked to Vince Palamara and a few talked to Seymour Hersh and revealed how some of his bodyguards deeply despised JFK.

This book however, in its pronounced fondness for the president and his family, is in stark contrast to the Dark Side of Camelot, in which Hersh convinced four members of the Secret Service Kennedy detail to “break their silence” and reveal some of the more trashy details of Kennedy’s extra-marital dalliances, as well as their personal distain for him. (10)

So this book isn’t the first insider’s account, but it is a good addition to what is already on the public record. This book was written and published in response to three other conspiracy books that have been written about the Secret Service and the assassination, one by former SS agents Abraham Bolden’s Dealey Plaza Echoes (11), Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt (12), and From A Window With A High Powered Rifle, by former FBI agent Don Adams.

While The Kennedy Detail still maintains the fantasy that the assassination was the work of one lone, deranged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald is hardly mentioned, and is simply dismissed as fitting “the classic profile of an assassin driven by a fanatical desire for recognition,” which is clearly contradicted by the fact that Oswald denied having killed anyone. So much for the “fanatical desire for recognition.” (13)

The whole idea that the institution of the Secret Service continues to officially proclaim that the President was murdered by a lone deranged gunman, yet fail to show how Lee Harvey Oswald was psychotic, cuts to the heart of the problem, and that political assassination will remain a serious national security threat until it is recognized that their accused assassin was actually the Patsy, and that the assassination was a political act to eliminate Kennedy by killing him. That those actually responsible for the crime got away with it and escaped justice is now a sidebar to the fact that it has yet to be determined exactly how the assassination actually transpired.

If elimination was the motive for the murder at Dealey Plaza, the murder can be understood, not in following the alleged assassin, but from a study and analysis of the victim. (14)

In such elimination murders, crime scene investigators know that the killer is just a pawn who is removed from the actual sponsors of the killing by layers of “buffers,” as Joe Valachi called them, or “cut-outs,” as they are referred to by intelligence officers. Therefore, it is from a study of President Kennedy, and not Oswald the Patsy, that we discover who killed him.

Since the assassination must be viewed as part of an overall Big Picture that also includes the entire Kennedy administration, The Kennedy Detail is valuable because it encompasses it all, at least in part, and provides some colorful details of the presidential trips, including descriptions of visits to Berlin, Ireland, Italy, India and Mexico City.

Domestically, the Kennedy family spent much of its time, not only at the White House, but at Glenn Ora and Wexford, the rural weekend retreats in Middleburg, Virginia, in Palm Springs, where JFK went to play golf with the boys, Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family maintained a bayside home, and New York City, where Kennedy had a permanent residence at the Carlyle Hotel. Each destination had unique security considerations and each gave them different challenges, most successfully met, but it is the one failure for which they will be remembered.

DALLAS AND TAMPA ADVANCE REPORTS

As this book intimidates, the presidential trips planned for Chicago and Tampa earlier in November, 1963 were somehow connected to the assassination in Dallas. These were trips that were so significant and sensitive that the advance reports had to be officially destroyed by the Secret Service after the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) requested them. These are the same reports that Blaine now says he saved and still has in his possession. (15) The National Archives and Records Administration should recover them and make them available to the public as the JFK Act requires.

Since this book isn’t written in the first person, quoting the agents as their own personal narrative, it is apparent that Blaine, Hill and fellow agents told their stories to Lisa McCubbin, and she wrote the book, lacing it with assassination records released under the JFK Act. And it is to McCubbin’s credit that the book is easy to read, though it is filtered through her reporting.

Although most of what Abraham Bolden had said about the Chicago and Tampa plots to kill Kennedy has been independently confirmed (See: Jim Douglas, JFK & the Unspeakable), Blaine has a bug up his butt about Bolden, and in order to refute him, pulls out the missing and reputedly destroyed advance reports that no one else has seen.

As McCubbin puts it, “It had been a long time, but Blaine was compelled to pull out his files to make sure his memory was serving him correctly. Like any good investigator, he had kept all his personal reports for all these years. Every time they moved to a new house, with his various jobs, (his wife) Joyce had asked him why couldn’t he throw all that stuff away, but he’d insisted the boxes of files were important. He found the box from 1963 and started going through it. It was all there. Pages and pages of information that refuted all the claims this guy (former Agent Abraham Bolden) was making. He was holding in his hands the Tampa advance report that had supposedly been destroyed.”(16)

The National Archives and Records Administration and those responsible for the JFK Assassination Records Collection should be interested in knowing that Blaine has the advance reports for Chicago and Tampa that the Secret Service claims were intentionally destroyed after the ARRB requested them. And while Blaine claims these records refute the contentions of former agent Abraham Bolden that there were significant connections between the Chicago and Tampa trips and what happened in Dallas, those records should be released to the public so we can make up our own minds about what they say.

While the official records are important, it is from the personal recollections and anecdotes that make The Kennedy Detail fascinating. The book is chock full of such interesting stories about the personal interactions between the agents and the Kennedy family. For instance, there’s the time JFK beaned Blaine on the head with a golf ball [p.89]. Then the day at Hyannis Port when Kennedy sent his escort agents out sailing, knowing they would flip over and get drenched. And totally fascinating is the home movie Jackie made of the president’s assassination, complete with Secret Service agents jumping out of the car to chase the assassin, an eerie premonition of what was to come.(17)

But the two stories that seem to be getting the most attention concern whether Kennedy ordered the agents off the bumper and the time Blaine almost accidentally shot LBJ at the Elms - LBJ’s DC residence, on the evening of the assassination. From these two incidents – the president’s request for agents to stay off the bumper, and the security at the Elms, we can see the relationship between the orders given and how they were carried out.

IVY LEAGUE CHARLATINS

As related in William Manchester’s book The Death of the President, Agent Blaine claims that he was told by the head of the White House Detail, Special Agent In Charge (SAIC) Jerry Behn, that while in Tampa four days before the assassination, the president told Behn “To keep Ivy League Charlatans off the bumper, back there.” (18)

To Behn, this was taken as a request they didn’t officially enter into any report, but orally passed along (over the radio) to other agents, such as Blaine and Hill, which resulted in the agents being ordered off the bumper of the presidential limo for the Dallas motorcade from Love Field to Dealey Plaza. The order given and the result being a dead president.

Then in the hours after the assassination we hear on the extant Air Force One radio transmissions, an order from Air Force One to the White House for a new secure telephone circuit to be put in LBJ’s private residence, the Elms, where the new president will spend the night. And it is Blaine at the other end of the order who is assigned to go to the Elms and secure the premises while the WHCA puts in the secure telephone lines. (19)

One of the most useful aspects of The Kennedy Detail is the appendix, which includes the radio codes names for most of the major players (ie. JFK is Lancer and Behn is Duplex), as well as the scenes of the crimes – AF1 (Angel), Andrews AFB (Acrobat) , the White House (Crown) and the Elms (Valley), which helps us decode and make sense of the Air Force One radio conversations and transcripts that we have. [See: Transcript and link to audio at Mary Ferrell Achives.]

INCIDENT AT THE ELMS

Blaine also explains the levels of security that were set up at the Elms, with the DC Police setting the first line of defense on the street, then a military presences with a National Guard unit stationed around the perimeters of the property, while the Secret Service were responsible for the house itself. (20) According to Blaine they set four men at each corner of the residence and they rotated clockwise every half hour in order to keep sharp. This is in contrast to the White House Oval Office door guard duty, which Blaine recounts as very boring, instigating the responsible agents to spend their time counting the floor tiles.

So when the new President approaches Blaine from an unexpected direction, apparently walking around his spacious backyard, Blaine almost shoots him with his cocked and ready Thompson submachine gun. Although Blaine doesn’t speculate, one wonders where the President was coming from? I’d like to know who his neighbors were and if he was visiting a confidential confidant, as he occasionally visited his former neighbor J.E. Hoover before he moved to the Elms.

THE MONDAY MORNING MEETING

Then it does seems odd, in the circumstances that Blaine puts it, that shortly after the President has been assassinated and he almost accidentally kills the new president for sneaking up on him in the dark, Blaine is called to the office of the director on Monday morning. It’s the day of the funeral, and he expects the worse, a dressing down for the machine gun incident at the Elms. But when he gets there, he is surprised to find all of the top Secret Service officials there – except Kellerman, the agent responsible for Dallas. And the topic isn’t about him almost shooting LBJ with the machine gun at the Elms. Instead, it’s about the Tampa trip and JFK’s “Ivy League Charlatans” remark for the Secret Service to back off the bumper.

One wonders whether or not there are official records, minutes or reports of this meeting, because it sure sounds fascinating. (21)

Although played out of proportion in the mainstream press, the subject of the agents on the bumper was a rather odd topic to be discussing on the day of the funeral, rather than the more substantive issues like how the President was killed, who did it and why.

It is highly unlikely the top brass of the Secret Service would hold such a meeting just to discuss the “Ivy League Charlatans” and the agents on the bumper issue. They must have made a lot of important, strategic decisions at that meeting, including whether or not they were to accept the guilt of the now dead chief suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, and whether or not he was to be considered as part of a Cuban Commie conspiracy or branded a Lone Nut Case.

The implications of JFK ordering them off the bumper may be a good excuse as to why they failed in their responsibility, and CTA - Cover Their Ass, but it doesn’t answer the question of how and why JFK was not protected from being shot in the head by a sniper with a high powered rifle. Did JFK also tell them not to bother checking the open windows in the buildings on the parade route so he would be a sitting duck for such snipers?

You would think that they would be especially on guard for a sniper attack since the Walker shooter was still on the loose, the Chicago plot entailed a sniper and as detailed in Don Adams’ book, an FBI informant had reported that a right wing extremist (Milteer) had said the president would be killed by a sniper from a high rise building. Then there were the two kids who had been found with a rifle in an office building overlooking where the President would speak in Fort Worth that morning, and JFK’s acknowledgement to both his personal aides and Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, that if someone wanted to kill him with a rifle, nobody could stop them. (22) With so many hints of a possible sniper attack, certainly such a scenario had to be seriously considered.

KELLERMAN’S RELIEF – No Threat Suspects in Dallas?

Another significant aspect of The Kennedy Detail is the insight it gives into the Protective Research Section (PRS), the department of the Secret Service responsible for identifying threats to the president, and countering them.

When it came to Dallas, Gerry Behn - the Special Agent In Charge of the Kennedy Detail decided to take a vacation and in his place sent Special Agent Roy Kellerman (aka Digest) to lead the Texas trip.

As part of the routine, before leaving for Dallas SA Kellerman checked in with the PRS to get the files on potential threats in the area, but was told there were no identified potential threats in the Dallas area at all.

According to The Kennedy Detail, Kellerman “felt relieved” at this news. (23)

But I can assure you for certain that Kellerman most certainly didn’t feel relieved. How could Kellermen possibly feel relieved? How could he feel relieved that the PRS found no possible threats in Dallas when the media had reported that US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was physically attacked by an unruly Dallas crowd a week earlier? And if they weren’t Secret Service, then who were those guys who were reviewing the television news reels of the incident in order to try to identify those suspects? (24)

And in response to the criticism of the FBI in the aftermath of the assassination, J. E. Hoover himself wrote a memo to the Chief Rowley of the Secret Service reminding him that the FBI did tip them off about a Dallas police informant who reported on a college student who had threatened the President.(25) This informant was run by the Dallas Police unit that was composed entirely of US Army Reserve officers led by Captain Gannaway and Lt. Revill.(26)

As the late Professor Philip H. Melanson concludes in his book The Secret Service – The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, (27) the PRS depends on local police intelligence units to provide them with the basic information on potential threats and suspects, and in Dallas that would have been the responsibility of the Dallas Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Section of the Special Services Bureau, run by Gannaway and Revill. (28) [See: The SS PRS and the DPD SSBCIS]

Blaine didn’t enjoy the dry, daily grind of guarding the president and his family, but instead liked to do the advance work and run down the leads on potential threats provided by the PRS. He says he really liked working for the Secret Service, but after JFK was killed, Blaine says on his web site (but not in the book) that “LBJ was no JFK.”

And indeed he wasn’t, and he didn’t treat the Secret Service with the same respect that JFK did, despite calling them “Ivy League Charlatans.”

LBJ didn’t trust the Secret Service one bit, and personally asked J. E. Hover to provide an FBI agent to be at his side whenever he traveled aboard AFI, and requested a specific agent – Orrin Bartlett, who was the FBI’s liaison to the Secret Service at the time of the assassination. (29)

LBJ didn’t like the Secret Service agents being around all the time, and seemed to enjoy pissing on the legs of an agent. When the agent told LBJ what he was doing, LBJ reportedly replied, “That’s my perogative.” (30)

And so within a year Agent Blaine left the Secret Service and at the suggestion and recommendation of former LBJ congressional aide Jack Hight, took a job at IBM. Although Hight supposedly spoke highly of IBM, he didn’t stick around there long himself, and moved on to other companies and is now CEO of Modus Operandi. (31)

I had hoped that since he went from the Secret Service and the Kennedy Detail to IBM, Blaine might have had some answers to some outstanding questions related to IBM and the assassination. For instance, two IBM employees were with Johnny Brewer in the shoe store on Jefferson Blvd. when Tippit’s alleged assassin ducked into the shoe store alcove to avoid a police cruiser. Who were those guys and why were they never identified or questioned?(32)

And then there’s the report that there was a moving film or video of the assassination on a television in the Dallas IBM office on the afternoon of the assassination, an incident never confirmed or explained.(33)

But Blaine doesn’t get into either of those incidents.

Instead he describes how he assisted IBM in developing their top line computers that have been used by the intelligence agencies, FBI and Secret Service, yet doesn’t explain how all the information they compiled can’t seem to keep them from keeping assassins from killing important people.(34)

And as far as I can tell, they will never figure it out until they acknowledge that President Kennedy wasn’t the victim of a deranged lone nut case, and was killed in the course of a covert intelligence operation, and the perpetrators remain unknown.

The Kennedy Detail is an important book that fills in many of the blank pieces to the Dealey Plaza puzzle. It provides evidence of conspiracy and other crimes, presents new leads that can be pursued, adds a few new, living witnesses to the proceedings, and identifies important records that were supposedly destroyed.

But rather than putting an end to the nagging doubts people have about the assassination, it presents more questions than it answers.

[Bill Kelly can be reached at bkjfk3@yahoo.com]

NOTES: (Incomplete)

1) Appendix, The Kennedy Detail, p. 405-408
2) TKD, p. 214-216. First shot hit Kennedy in back, second shot hit Connally and third shot hit Kennedy in the head.
3) TKD, p. 217. “Slumped across the seat, President Kennedy lay unmoving, a bloody, gaping, fist-sized hole clearly visible in the back of his head.” Also see: TKD, p. 266. “All Clint could see was that the right rear portion of President Kennedy’s head was completely gone.” As all forensic pathologists and crime scene investigators know, entrance wounds are small and exit wounds are large.
4) TKD, p. 357. “He found the box from 1963 and started going through it all. It was there. Pages and pages of information….He was holding in is hands the Tampa advance reports that had supposedly been destroyed.”
5) TKD, p. 285-289. Monday morning meeting with SS Chief James Rowley, re: Ivy League charlatans. “Halfback, Lancer requests the Ivy League charlatans drop back to your location,” off the bumper. “We cannot say that the president’s assassination was caused by his own actions – that he was somehow at fault.”
6) TKD, p. 264. “He was on post at the rear corner of President Johnson’s large two-story French chateau-style house close to the back door…Instinctively Blaine picked up the Thompson submachine gun and activated the bolt on top….Blaine’s heart pounded, his finger firmly on the trigger. Let me see your face, you bastard. The next instant there was a face to go with the footsteps. The new President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had just rounded the corner, and Blaine had the gun pointed directly at the man’s chest. In the blackness of the night, Johnson’s face went completely white. A spit second later, Blaine would have pulled the trigger.” Although Blaine asks, “What the hell was he coming around the wrong way for?” - he doesn’t ask where LBJ was coming from, and whether or not he was just taking a piss or visiting a neighbor.
7) TKD makes news headlines: Ex-Agent Almost Shoots LBJ – CBS News [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DU8AqHpC4dwJ:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/20/national/main6974911.shtml+The+Kennedy+Detail+almost+shoots+LBJ&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
The Kennedy Detail: JFK ordered agents off the bumper. Discovery News.
[http://news.discovery.com/history/jfk-assassination-secret-service.html]
“Four days before the fateful 1963 motorcade in Dallas,…the young president had requested that his secret service agents give him some space.”
8) The Discovery Channel program based on the The Kennedy Detail.
9) The Sixth Floor program – Gary Mack interviews Lisa McCubbin, Gerald Blaine and Clint Hill.
10) Hersh, Seymore. The Dark Side of Camelot.
11) Bolden, Abraham. Echoes from Dealey Plaza.
12) Palamara, Vincent. Survivor’s Guilt.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Dk2GHxsQVgwJ:vincepalamarasurvivorsguilt.blogspot.com/+Vince+Palamara+Survivor's+Guilt&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
13) TKD, p. 255. Re: False portrait of Oswald as having “fanatical desire for recognition.”
14) Kessler, William F. and Weston, Paul, The Detection of Murder (1953 Greenberg). “Professional criminals do not usually kill for any other motive than elimination…Elimination killings…are truly difficult to unravel...In over 90 percent of these killings the persons who have the motive for the killing never handle the gun that fires the fatal shots, nor drive a car that is used in the killing. They are involved in the conspiracy and are guilty of murder because they procured the ‘trigger men’ who did the actual killing, but they have an alibi to prove they were many miles away from the scene of death at the time of the homicide….”
15) Secret Service Destroys Records. ARRB Final Report.
16) TKD, p. 357. See: Quote Note #4).
17) Film, by Knudsen. P. 130-131.
18) Manchester, William. Death of a President. (Harper & Row)
19) See: AFI Radio Transmissions; Transcript.
20) TKD, Blaine, Gerald, TKD
21) Secret Service Monday morning meeting, Nov. 25, 1963. Rowley, Blaine, et al.
22) Rowley, memo, re: JFK statement on sniper; JFK Aide O’Donnell.
23) TKD, Blaine, Gerald, (p. y) re: “Kellerman relieved” no PRS suspects.
24) Wise, Wes. Stevenson attack suspects on film; TKD, pictures in pockets of agents at Trade Mart.
25) Hover memo to Rowley, re: JBS threat suspect, w/photo.
26) Gannaway, Revill, reports on JBS threat suspect.
27) Melanson, Phil. History of Secret Service, re: DPD SSB CIU provides local information on suspects from informants.
28) Melenson, Phil. History of the Secret Service. DPD SSB CIU.
29) DeLoach, Cartha, Oral History, LBJ Library.
30) TKD, re: IBM, Jack Hight.
31) Jack Hight bio.
32) IBM employees at shoe store.
33) Film of assassination on TV at IBM office.
34) TKD; Blaine at IBM.

The SS PRS and DPD CIS

 

THE PROTECTIVE RESEARCH SECTION (PRS)

As described in the book The Kennedy Detail, in preparation for any presidential visit to a new area, the Protective Research Section (PRS) of the Secret Service prepares a report and lists those individuals who have been identified as being a potential threat to the President. They have a master file of thousands of potential threat suspects, a top 400 list of those who are serious, and a top ten list with photos of those who are most likely to be an immediate threat.

“Agent Blaine loved doing advances,” McCubbin explains in The Kennedy Detail. “To him it was the most exciting and challenging part of being on the White House Detail. He’d much rather be coordinating security in a new city or foreign country than standing post on a dark night in Hyannis Port or Palm Beach, looking out at the black ocean. In reality, the advance work was 95 percent of the effort in guaranteeing the president’s safety on a trip. The political team put together the president’s itinerary and it was the Secret Service’s job to figure out how to move the president safely from one place to the next, how to secure every venue and every route. You had to think like an assassin.”

“The first stop before any advance was always the PRS. Located in the Executive Office Building (EOB), next door to the White House, the PRS offices were the nerve center for tracking threat cases. Any time there was a threat made against the president’s life – whether it was a written letter, a phone call, details gathered from an informant, field investigation or an unstable person trying to get inside the Northwest Gate of the White House – an investigative report was initiated and a case file number issued. A PRS agent would type the report on carbon paper so there would be multiple copies, noting the threat maker’s name, last known address, a synopsis of the threats made, a description of the person, and their medical history, if known.”

“Cases were analyzed and categorized according to the seriousness of the threat. They ranged from ‘extremely dangerous’ to the innocuous ‘gate crasher.’….Whenever somebody made a threat against the president, they would be categorized as a permanent risk. There’d be an evaluation, the individual would be monitored, and the case file would remain in the Protective Research file for as long as the person was still alive. It wasn’t uncommon that a person who made a threat against one president would continue making threats against each subsequent president. This could go on for thirty or forty years, so some of the cases files were pretty thick.

“The records room of the PRS office contained rows and rows of gray metal four-draw file cabinets that held thousands of threat suspects files, organized by case number. There were smaller file cabinets where index cars of each suspect were organized both geographically and alphabetically. The cards were cross-referenced to the case files. Thus if you knew either the name of a suspect or their last known location, you could go to the small index drawers, locate the card, which would the case number on it, then go to the large filing cabinets to get the master file.”

“The most serious threat suspects were the ones on the flash cards every agent carried with them at all times. It was the nature of threat makers to wander as vagabonds or itinerants, moving from town to town or state to state. You never knew when or where one of them might show up.”

Protective Research Section

Current Active Threats – 1963

1. Stanley Berman – professional gate crasher.
2. Carl Brookman – on record with FBI subversive activities in the Nazi Part and possible association with the Communist Part. Possesses firearm.
3. William Robert Bennett – disabled veteran.
4. John Francis Donovan – letter and telegram writer. Considered a nuisance.
5. Johnnie Mae Hackworth – letter writer, religious fanatic who made threats against the president, arrested in 1955 and 1960.
6. Josef Molt Mroz – picketer and “Polish freedom fighter.”
7. Barney Grant Powell – threatened Truman, extreme temper, violent man with assault background, carries firearms.
8. Peppi Duran Flores – threatened Vice President Johnson. Says he is a communist and pro-Castro.
9. Wayne L. Gainery – claimed the KKK authorized him to kill the President in 1963. Teenager.
10. John William Warrington – mental; wrote five letters threatening JFK for his association with Martin Luther King, Jr.; says he will by lying in ambush in Florida.

P. 63. The Kennedy Detail. (Blaine, J. Hill, C. Gallery, S&S, 2010).

Document #180-10118-10032 also includes two additional names

11. …arvin Langdon Parker – mental; pretensions of being a JFK staff member.
12. Joseph Jesse Gilliam – WH visitor; friendly; mental.

The late Professor Phil Melanson, in his History of the Secret Service - The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency (Carroll and Graff, 2002, p. 158) writes:

The Office of Protective Research, which works very closely with the Office of Protective Operations, constitutes the nerve center of the agency's protective mission. It is responsible for collecting, analyzing, storing, and disseminating vital data gathered byt he Service itself or provided to it by other local, state, and federal agencies. These are files on forty thousand U.S. citizens who, for one reason or another, have come to the Service's attention. The office also compiles data on threats against political leaders and on the names, faces, methods, threats and means of those who make them. This role has taken on dramatic new resonance since the tragedy of September 11. On the Service's "Watch List" are four hundred persons considered dangerous to protectees, a process augmented by an in-house team of research psychologists that works on the identification of dangerous persons...

Because of a recomendation by the Warren Commission, which, in the wake of the John F. Kennedy assassination, contended that the Secret Service did not maintain sufficient contact with state, local, and federal agencies (and was therefore not receiving enough of the kind of data it needed to perform its protective mission effectively), the agency created the Office of Protective Research's Liaison Division. For the next eighteen years, the division made surface changes; however, cooperation between the Service and local law-enforcement bodies remained ragged. Subsequently, the liaison function was fused with public affairs, creating the Office of Public Affairs and Government Liaison....

...The two critical questions hurled by the press and public alike at the Service in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and beyond were: How had the agents failed in Dallas? And how had the Service missed Oswald? Within days, the Service was harangued because Oswald was not in its files, either on its list of four hundred dangerous persons or in its general files on more than forty thousand U.S. citizens. The Secret Service had combed through its protective research files and found no dangerous persons in the Dallas area, though there were two in Houston. Unfortunately, the Warren Report revealed just how limited were the resources of the protective research section, "a very small group of twelve specialists and three clerks."

In the weeks before Kennedy arrived in Dallas, the Service did make a special effort to identify the individuals who had formented a near-riot by throwing rocks during the Adlai Stevenson incident. Agents worked with the Dallas police, who found an informant willing to identify the ringleaders of the demonstration by viewing a television film of the incident; then the Secret Service made still pictures of these ringleaders and distributed the images to agents and police who would be stationed at Love Field and at the Trade Mart. None of these potential troublemakers was ever spotted before or during the Kennedy visit.

Additionally, the Stevenson episode prompted the Service to pay "special attention to extremist groups known to be active in the Dallas area." Still, in Oswald's case, nothing that would have caused the Secret Service to enter him into their files or onto the "Watch List" materialized. He had not threatened the president, had never been convicted of a violent crime, or joined a group who "believes in assassination as a political weapon."

The real question was why Oswald was not brought to the attention of the Secret Service by the FBI, who did havea file on him and knew that he was in Dallas. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and stayed more than two years before returning to the United States, where he ostensibly became affiliated with several politcal groups, including the pro-Castro Fair Playfor Cuba Committee(FPCC), the Socialist Workers Party, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). None of the groups Oswald seemingly joined was considered violent, nor did any of them advocate assassination as a political weapon. The FBI's interest in Oswald was as a potential subversive, a security risk, not as a violence-prone potential assassin. However, the Bureau did interview Oswald on several occassions after his return from the Soviet Union an dwas monitoring him to see if he joined the Communist Party, which would have made him particularly subversive in the eyes of the bureau. Oswald did not join the Communist Party.

Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty had interviewed both Oswald and his wife Marina. Oswald resented these interviews andhad allegedly written a note to Hosty - the contents of which are not known for certain - warning him not to annoy Marina. The note was destoryed by Agent Hosty shortly after the assassination. A number of Kennedy assassination theorists suspect that the note was threatening and Hosty should have handed it to his supeiors. They imply thathe got rid of it to cover himself for having missed Oswald as some sort of potential threat.

If the Bureau made a practice of reporting suspected subversives to the Secret Service, the latter's files would be overwhelmed. The Secret Service told the Warren Commission that federal agencies were supposed to report "all information that they come in contavct with that would indicate danger to the president." But the handbook given in 1963 to FBI agents required only the reporting of specific reports of a "threat" against the president, his family, the vice president, or the president-elect and vice president-elect. It cannot be stated, except witht he benefit of hindsight, that the Bureau erred in not reporting Oswald to the Secret Service.

Dallas police documents sitting in Warren Commission files show that despite the public attention focused on the Secret Service and the FBI's failure to identify Oswald as a potentially dangerous person, the real failure to discover both Oswald and an extremist group in Dallas lay with the local police. Even though the Service's protective research section had fils on more than forty thousand persons, the agency depended in large part on the local police for "identifying" and "neutralizing" potentially dangerous persons in the area to be visited by the president. Documents reveal that operational responsiblity for identifying and investigating indigenous groups and individuals who might constitute a threat or embarrassment to President Kennedy fell to a twenty-man Dallas Police Department unit - the Criminal Intelligence Section [CSI], headed by Lt. Jack Revill.

In and around Dallas, the Criminal Intelligence Section investigated fourteen groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Muslims, and the local Nazi Part. As its name implied, the Criminal Intelligence Section had a clandestine capability. As a police memo describes:

This Section [Criminal Intelligence] had previously [before beginning to work on protective research for Kennedy's viist] been successful in infiltrating a number of these organizations; therefore, the activities, personalities and future plans of these groups were known.

The Criminal Intelligence Section made two glaring errors in protective intelligence gathering forthe president's visit, errors that cannot be laid upon the Secret Service. One was the omission of notice about Oswald. Unlike the FBI, whose written instructions to agents called for reporting persons who made threats against the president, the Criminal Intelligence Section had a broader mission of identifying person who might threaten or embarrass the president. The Dallas detective compiled a list of four hundred names, so broadly was the net cast that four dozen persons who belonged to the Young People's Socialist League were placed on the list simply because of the left-wing nature of their group. But Oswald, whose defection to the Soviet Union as a self-pronounced Marxist had been covered in the local press, was not included on the list.

The Criminal Intelligence Section evidently missed a specific chance to catch Oswald in its data net: He had joined one of the fourteen groups under surveillance - the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which many law-enforcement officers deemed a communist organization. In the anti-communist, law-and-order spectrum of Dallas politics in 1963, the police targeted them for reasons cited in a police memo: "This organization is known to have defended communists causes in many cases and has also opposed laws which are detrimental to the communist cause."

Meanwhile, Oswald, with his wife and two children, had been staying at the home of Michael and Ruth Paine. Michael Paine was a member of the ACLU and regularly attended its meetings. Oswald attended an October 25, 1963 meeting of the Dallas ACLU with his host. During the meeting, Oswald spoke and, after it broke up, got into a heated argument with a man who defended the free-enterprize system against Oswald's leftist remarks. The ACLU was under survillance by police on a continuing basis, even before protective-intelligence gathering for the president's visit had begun, meaning that they either ignored Oswald or missed him entirely.

Within a few days of the ACLU meeting, Oswald formally joined the ACLU and opened up a post office box in Dallas. On the postal form, he authorized the receipt of mail for the ACLU and also for the pro-Castro FPCC, yet another red flag revealing Oswald's seemingly leftist or pro-communist leanings, and one missed or ignored by police intelligence.

Besides missing Oswald, the police Criminal Intelligence Section made another glaring error about a group that would have perhaps tipped off the Service to potential trouble in Dallas. The Stevenson incident had of course caught the attention of the Service, which was especially interested in "extremist groups" in the Dallas area and always seeking out intelligence on any cadre that contemplated assassination as a political weapon. Yet the police intelligence unit failed to report such a group to the agency. The group was Alpha-66.

The Dallas chapter of Alpha 66 was holding meetings in a house on Harlendale Street in Dallas for several weeks prior to the assassination. Perhaps the most militant and violent of all anti-Castro groups, Alpha-66 was composed of Cuban exiles, many of whom had fought inthe ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Alpha-66 was basically a right-wing commando group that launched missions against Castro's Cuba from the U.S. coast - missions involving both sabotage and assassination.

Before the Kennedy assassination, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had been investigating the owner of a Dallas gun shop regarding illegal arms sales. They discovered that Alpha-66 had attempted to purchase bazookas and machine guns. The group, according to the gun-shop owner, had a large cache of arms somewhere in Dallas, but ATF never reported the allegation to the Secret Service.

The agency would have immediately regarded the presence of a group of commandoes enraged at Kennedy as a potential threat. The Cubans of Alpha-66 were angered that Kennedy had refused to provide U.S. air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion; many exiles held him personally responsible for their disasterous defeat at the hands of Castro's army Also, Kennedy had banned Cuban exile groups from launching raids against the island from U.S. soil and had publicly criticized Alpha-66 for violating this ban, to which the national head of Alpha-66 replied, "We are going to attack again and again."

When the Dallas band of Alpha-66 did come to the attention of the Secret Service after the assassination, an FBI informant in Dllas reported that the head of the Dallas chapter, Manuel Rodriguez, "was known to be violently anti-President Kennedy." According to another Warren Commmission document that was accidently released in 1976 while it was still classified, Rodriguez was "apparently a survivor of the Bay of Pigs episode."

Although the police Criminal Intelligence Section had missed Alpha-66 and its leader, another local law-enforcement unit with less intelligence gathering capability, teh Dallas County Sheriff's Office, stumbled upon the group. At 8:00 A.M on the day after the assassination, the Sheriff's Office passed along a "hot tip" to the Secret Service: For about two months prior to the assassination, Oswald had been meeting in a house on Harlendale Street with a group that the Sheriff's Office assumed to be the pro-Castro FPCC. The group reportedly met there for several weeks, up to either a few days before the assassination or the day after. The group gathering at the house was actually Alpha-66.

The confusion appears to have resulted from the fact thta Manuel Rodriguez, the head of the Dallas chapter, bore a resembalance to Lee Harvey Oswald, a fact that was independently confirmed by the FBI. The Bureau checked into a report that Oswald had been to Oklahoma on November 17, 1963, accompanied by several Cubans, and discovered that the Oklahoma witness had seen Rodriguez, not Oswald. According to an FBI memorandum signed by J. Edgar Hover, Rodriguez was five feet nine inches, 145 ponds, with brown hair.

The Dallas Police Criminal Intelligence Section's inability to find or report on Alpha-66 is all the more inexplicable because of a tape recording that surfaced in 1978 during the reinvestigation of the John Kennedy case conducted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-1978. Secretly recorded at a meeting of the Dallas John Birch Society (JBS) the month before the assassination, the tape caught an anti-Castro exile and Bay of Pigs survivor - thogh not a member of Alpha-66 - denouncing Kennedy.


"Get him out. Get him out. The quicker, the sooner the better. He's doing all kinds of deals. Mr. Kennedy is kissing Mr. Khrushchev. I wouldn't be surprised if had kissed Castro too. I wouldn't even call him "President" Kennedy. He stinks. We are waiting for Kennedy the twenty-second [November], buddy. We are going to see him one way or the other. We're going to give him the works when he gets to Dallas."

As with the ACLU, the John Birch Society was being monitored by the Criminal Intelligence Section, falling into the realm of extremists meriting scrutiny in the wake of the Stevenson episode. The "Birchers" loathed Kennedy because of his alleged softness on communism and his civil-rights policies.

The Secret Service would have taken the Birch Society distain for the president as a development to monitor. At the lesat, the diatribe should have precipitated increased efforts to discover and monitor any anti-Castro groups in Dallas. Even though police documents indicate that they attended meetings of the target groups, the Criminal Intelligence Section either missed the speech against Kennedy or failed to act on it. In either case, the Secret Service was given no idea of the possible threat.

One police memorandum stated that the Birch Society "is an active extremist group" in Dallas and that an "effort was made to [somehow stage an event] of an embarrassing nature [to the president]. It was determined that no such action was planned."

The Criminal Intelligence Section's failure to discover or reprot the anti-Castroite's assertion that "we're going to give him the works when he gets to Dallas" or to uncover or report the presence of Alpha-66 and its allegedly "violently anti-Kennedy" leader comprises a gaffe tht may well have contributed to lax or flawed protective measures for Kennedy in Dallas. If the Secret Service had received even an inkling that the local Cuban exiles were threatening the president in any way, the agency might well have tightened precautions. Not long before the Dallas trip, the Service had received word of a plot to assassinte President Kennedy; allegedly being planned by an unspecified group of Cuban exiles, the scheme was to ram Air Force One in midair with a small plane as the president approached Miami. Kennedy's itinerary was changed and no threat materialized. Thus, in Dallas, the Service would have been wary of any Cuban exile group, especially a comando group such as Alpha-66. Had its presence been detected and reported, the Secret Service might have been able to persuade the president to accept additional protective measures,m or agents might have operated with a keener sense of looming danger.

To summarize, the copious documentary record of the Secret Service's performance during the agency's most tragic episode does reveal that the failure most often attributed to it - the inability to identify Oswald as a potentially dangerous person -was not a Secret Service error at all. But failures in the gathering of intelligence did occur. The Criminal Intelligence Section of the Dallas Police Department had the best opportunity and the best reason to discover both Oswald and Alpha-66, but neither was reported to the Service. If Oswald alone had been reported, there probably would have been nothing in his background that would have casused the Service to "red flag" the trip as especially dangerous.

In terms of protective performance during the shooting, through political priorities had predetermined much of the situation - an open car with no agents allowed on the running boards - agents failed to take immediate evasive and protective action that might have saved the president's life. The extensive post-assassintion criticism and analysis produced improved protective methods and technology.

Despite the Warren Commission's findings and government insistance on the lone-gunman/Oswald conclusion, several of the agents in the presidential detail did not accept the assertions. Later, some of the men expressed their belief that the case was really a conspiracy, as the vast majority of the U.S. public came to believe. Researcher Vince Palamara interviewed numerous Kennedy agents and cites Agents Sam Kinney, Abraham Bolden, Maurice Martineau, Marty Underwood, and John Norris as those who "believe this [conspiracy] to be the case." In addition says, Palamara, June Kellerman, the widow of agent Roy Kellerman, stated that both Kellerman and fellow agent Bill Greer, who were in the front seat of Kennedy's limo, asserted that there was more to the assassination than the "official" version let on...

The scene continues to haunt the Secret Service and shape the ways in which they protect the president. As a team performance, the agents' actions in Dallas were slipshod. Additional agents would not have saved the day had they reacted and operated sa did those at the scene...

The Secret Service investigates threats, but it is the FBI that has investigative responsiblity after the incident has occurred. The FBI also determines whether an assassination incident was a conspiracy or an assailant acting alone.



Joe Backes – The Tenth Batch Part Two

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/15th_Issue/arrb_tenth2.html

Document # 180-10118-10041 is a six page Secret Service report on John William Warrington. It is written by SA Arnold K. Peppers of the Tampa, Florida office. It covers the period of October 18-23, 1963. It's status is pending.

Synopsis- This file covers investigation of five threatening letters addressed to the President, postmarked Oct. 15, 16 and 17, at Tampa, Florida and as signed, "R. L. Scates". John William Warrington has been identified as the author of these letters and was arrested October 18, 1963, at Tampa, Fla., for mailing an extortion letter to a local bank president. Subject is currently under $50,000 bond and confined to the Tampa City Jail on the extortion charge. Subject claims a recent on "trial visit" from the VA hospital, Gulfport, Miss., and the Jackson office is requested to review his file for background information.

Mr. Warrington wrote a letter to Postal Inspector C. M. Griffith on October 17, 1963 that stated that the Postmaster was in danger of having a dynamite accident unless he purchased protection against such an accident for $1,000. The letter instructed Griffith to send ten $100 bills to Room No. 5, Albany Hotel, 1104 1/2 Franklin St. Tampa, Florida, and not to notify the FBI. While reviewing that letter another letter arrived dated October 18, 1963 nearly identical to the first.

Handwritten analysis of those two letters with the five sent to the president showed they were of common authorship.

On the evening of October 18, 1963 Secret Service agent Arnold K. Peppers received word from FBI agent Neil Welch, ASAIC, in the Tampa office that Warrington was arrested and in custody for sending yet another extortion letter to the President of the First National Bank of Tampa, Florida. Warrington told the FBI that the money raised in these extortion schemes was to be used to assassinate the President.

All extortion letters and the letters to the President had the same return address Room 5 of the Albany Hotel.

Warrington stated that he wanted to write five extortion letters to five bank presidents, that the money raised would be used to assassinate President Kennedy on his November 1963 Tampa visit. Warrington hated President Kennedy because he went to Harvard and all Harvard men are Communists.

SA Lee Ballinger of the FBI advised that Warrington had papers that indicated that he was recently released from the Veterans Hospital of Gulfport, Mississippi, and that in June of 1961 Warrington was sentenced to 20 years for similar extortion letters in Jacksonville, Florida. It is unknown if he escaped from Gulfport, Mississippi.

On October 23, 1963 Warrington was interviewed in the jail. He is described as an American white male, 53 years, 170 pounds, 5 feet 9 1/2 inches, medium build, ruddy complexion, blue eyes, thin greying hair, slightly stooped.

The subject appeared rational. He admitted to being in and out of mental hospitals for the last 15 years. He has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, paranoid type.

Michael Paine Affidavit – “I heard that the President was shot from the Texas School Book Depository. I knew that Lee Oswald worked there, and immediately thought of him and wondered if he might have shot the President, and wondered if I should call the FBI. I thought it unlikely that he shot the President, and that the F.B.I. was fully aware of his presence there….”

While Blaine calls Bolden a “convicted felon,” I call him a hero in my book, an early whistleblower who has at least tried to learn the truth as to what really happened at Dealey Plaza, and tried to call attention to the blatant racism and hatred of the President within the White House detail, a racism and hatred that just doesn’t come across in Blaine’s book, except underhandedly. As Oswald once put it, “You have to read between the lines.”
p. 195

Lawson made one final call to the Protective Research Section to make sure no new threats had come in overnight. PRS hadn’t received any new name; there were just the regulars; the ones the agents all carried on index cards in their jacket pockets.

Protective Research

http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/pdf/WH17_CE_768.pdf

Notice of the proposed Presidential trip to Dallas was furnished to the Protective Research Section on November 8, 1963. The indices were searched, and no active subjects were of record. No subsequent information was received from the Protective Research Section of any subject requiring attention.

Informants of the Right Wing Movement were interviewed by SA Howlett. Dallas Office, to identify any possible trouble makers. Motion-picture films of the assault on Ambassador Stevenson which occurred in Dallas were viewed with members of the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Dallas Police Department at Station KLRD TV-Radio. Still photographs were obtained of persons involved in this incident. SA Howlett was on duty at check point entrance at the Trade Mart with copies of these photographs and were screening for these individuals. A number of individuals who resembled those in these photographs were placed under surveillance at the Trade Mart.

At approximately 12:30 p.m. November 22, 1963, President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas were struck by gunfire while riding in SS-100-X during the motorcade to the Trade Mart. The President died at Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, at 1:00 p.m. CST, November 22, 1963.

http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/pdf/WH17_CE_768.pdf

p. 357
“Despite the earlier rejection of his allegations, Abraham Bolden was allowed to speak with HSCA investigators when the JFK assassination was reopened. Bolden told them that sometime before November 2, 1963, the FBI sent a Teletype message to the Chicago Secret Service office stating that there would be an attempt on Kennedy’s life in Chicago on November 2 by a four-man hit team using high-powered rifles. The HSCA interviewed Ed Tucker and other agents who were working in the Chicago office at that time, and none of them could recall any such thing. The HSCA could not document that such a case existed and found that Bolden’s story was of ‘questionable authenticity.’”

“Jerry remembered that the only possible threat investigation that occurred in Chicago before President Kennedy’s assassination involved a man called Thomas Arthur Vallee. Indded, Vallee was mentioned in the book as being somehow connected to this whole bizarre theory. His good friend Ed Tucker, who had been on the White House Detail during the early part of the Kennedy administration and had transferred back to the Chicago field office, had handled the Vallee investigation with another Chicago agent, Thomas Strong.”

“Jerry remembered when Cecil Taylor in PRS had first told him about Vallee, when he was preparing for the Tampa advance. He had heard the details of the story may times over the years straight from Ed Tucker. Vallee was a Korean War veteran who had scribbled threatening comments all over the strange collage of pictures of Kennedy and other political leaders he’s pasted on the wall of his Chicago boardinghouse room. When his landlady had notified the Secret Service that Vallee was planning to take the day off from work the same day the president was to be in Chicago, Tucker had directed the police to send out an all-points bulletin. Vallee was stopped for making an illegal turn, and when the officers saw an illegal knife in the front seat, they popped his trunk and found an M1 rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee was immediately incarcerated and was monitored until an accurate assessment could be made.”

“President Kennedy did indeed end up canceling his trip to Chicago for the Army-Air Force football game, but it nothing to do with Thomas Arthur Vallee or a four-man hit team, as Bolden had told the author. Blaine had been on post at the White House when President Kennedy was notified of the coup in Vietnam in which the Diem brothers were assassinated. The president immediately canceled the trip to Chicago and had meetings well into the night with every ranking member of his security, intelligence, and military staffs. The coup had global implications that needed to be addressed immediately. It was no time for the President of the United States to be attending a football game.”

And the Diem brothers weren’t assassinated by a lone-nut case like Oswald or Vallee, and the assassination of JFK still has implications that need to be addressed.
While Blaine might be through with Vallee, we shouldn’t be.

“Agent Blaine had called PBS from New York City earlier that morning and requested any Florida flies be pulled. When Blaine entered the records room, Cecil Taylor, the Special Agent on duty, had some index cards and manila file folders laid out on the table for him.”

“Cecil handed Jerry the one-page fact sheet on the new case. ‘His name is Vallee. Thomas Arthur Vallee. The Chicago office investigated this case about two weeks ago….”

“Subsequent investigation showed he is a member of some group called the John Birch Society – a right-wing conservative organization – and has had mental problems…”

The Pilot Car

 

(1) The pilot car. This is usually a local law enforcement car driven and manned by local officers. It precedes the main party over the route by approximately one-quarter mile. Its function is to alert the local officers along the route that the presidential motorcade is coming and to check ahead for any signs of trouble, disturbance or other complications. Occassionally it drops back to help with crowds. It is in radio communication with the lead car and other Dallas cars and stations....

http://www.maryferre...04&relPageId=20

Isanti County News, Cambridge MN
http://isanticountyn...9337&Itemid=118

Recently it was the 47th Anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Friday, 03 December 2010

Jack Puterbaugh
Contributing Writer

Isanti County News, Cambridge MN
http://isanticountyn...9337&Itemid=118

Recently it was the 47th Anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Since I was an advance man on that Presidential visit Nov. 22, it has a special meaning to me.

For that assignment we left on Nov. 12 on a Military Air Transport Service plane, and dropped off a crew of three at each of the places the President was to visit.

The Dallas crew, which included Secret Service Agent Win Lawson, Chief Warrant Officer Arthur Bailles of the Army Signal Corps and myself, were the last to land. The Dallas Presidential event was sponsored by the Dallas Citizens Council, whose members were the city's "shakers and movers."

Before we left we were informed that two possible locations were under consideration for the luncheon—a building on the State Fair Grounds and the Trade Mart—and that there would be a motorcade. There were some security concerns expressed about the Trade Mart building, but those concerns would be reviewed by the Secret Service.

After looking at the proposed sites and reviewing the motorcade route, and following a determination by the Secret Service that the Trade Mart building could be secured, a decision was made to select the Trade Mart and the subsequent route for the motorcade. The rest of the time was spent on who would be invited to the luncheon. There would be 2,500 at the luncheon, and there was competition regarding who would be the fortunate diners.

By the morning of Nov. 22, all of the details had been worked out, and when Air Force One put down at Love Field the expectation was the Dallas visit was going to be a big day for the President and Mrs. Kennedy.

When the motorcade pulled out I was in what is known as the "pilot car," a vehicle that is some five or six blocks ahead of the main motorcade. As we traveled the motorcade route, the crowds were huge and friendly as they awaited the arrival of the President.

The pilot car was a Dallas Police vehicle, and shortly after entering the Stemmons Freeway, there was a radio message that instructed all available police officers to report to the triple underpass area, and to alert the emergency facilities at Parkland Hospital.

Our car pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stopped. When the President's car and the Secret Service follow car sped by, we pulled behind and followed them to Parkland Hospital. For our country it was a very sad day, and unfortunately something was lost that has never been replaced. Thus, Nov. 22 will always have a special meaning to me.

Pilot Car - Dallas Motorcade 11/22/63

http://www.maryferre...04&relPageId=20


BK: Neither Phil Melanson's The Secret Service- The Hidden History nor The Kennedy Detail, include the pilot car in their story of JFK's motorcade through Dallas, and it is not mentioned in the first Secret Service report

[SS Report to WC re: Motorcade. List of cars – no mention of Pilot Car. http://www.maryferre...076&relPageId=2]

Melanson's study of the Secret Service procedures, especially its Protective Research Section (PRS), concludes that the Dallas Police Department Criminal Intelligence Section (DPD CIS) the PRS was depending on for local information, was responsible for the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald not being on the Secret Service 400 suspect Watch List.

The CIS had identified a dozen organizations that they considered worth keeping tabs on, including the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), two organizations that Oswald was affiliated with, that should have put him on their radar.

In addition, as Melanson also points out, they failed to identify the group of anti-Castro Cuban Alpha 66 terrorists that had taken up residence in a house in Oak Cliff, where Oswald was reported to have been seen.

We later learn, when Manuel Rodriguez was misidentified as Oswald in Oklahoma, that it was not Oswald but probably Rodriguez who was seen at the Alpha 66 house in Oak Cliff. One must wonder if there were any other incidents where Rodriguez was misidentified as Oswald, as there were numerous occasions where Oswald was said to have been when he most certainly couldn't have been. Some of these cases can be shown to be cases of mistaken identity, but some can also be shown to be cases of intentional impersonation.

[SS report on Manuel Rodriguez – Alpha 66 in Dallas http://www.maryferre...250&relPageId=2 ]

The ATF agent in Dallas had learned from a local Dallas gun dealer, who also resembled Oswald, that Rodriguez was trying to buy arms for his group to attack targets in Cuba, and this agent and FBI agent James Hosty, along with US Army Intelligence officer Ed Coyle, met together on the morning of the assassination to discuss this case.

But it was a Deputy Shriff (Buddy Walters?) who informed the Secret Service about the Alpha 66 being in Dallas after the assassination.

Coyle worked with the 112th US Army Intelligence group under Col. Robert Jones, who testified before the HSCA that he was responsible for counter-intelligence against such subversive suspects as Rodriguez and Oswald, and that his group, responsible for a region that included Texas and Louisiana, had files on both Rodriguez and Oswald.

Jones was also familiar with Capt. James Powell, who photographed the scene of the crime shortly after the assassination, and said both Jones and Coyle were working that day, while Powell says he took off to photograph the motorcade on his own time. Jones also said that there were eight to ten other plainclothes officers from his group who worked on security for the President's visit to Texas, including Dallas.

But Jones did not know or recognize the name of Gen. Whitmyer, the head of the 488th Army Reserves unit based in Dallas, whose officers included men in the pilot car of the motorcade and the entire 50 man Criminal Intelligence Unit (DPD CIU) including Lt. Jack Revell and Captain Gannaway, who ran most of the informants for the Dallas Police Department. [It has been reported that the office of the CIU Special Services Unit was at the Texas State Fairgrounds, rather than DPD HQ, so informants could report in without being seen at the DPD HQ.]

According to The Kennedy Detail (Blaine, Hill et al, 2010), the PRS didn't have one suspect in the Dallas area among their top 400 suspicious subjects on the Watch List, yet there was an ongoing investigation into those who were filmed by a TV news crew physically assaulting United Nations Ambassador Adli Stevenson.

In addition, we learn from J. E. Hoover's memo to Secret Service Chief Rowley (Dec. 18) that the FBI did indeed tip the Secret Service off about a suspect who threatened the president, a John Birch Society (JBS) college student whose threat was reported by a DPD CIU informant and investigated by Revell and Gannaway. They apparently talked with the suspect, who said he wasn't going to be in Dallas when the President was there, and they apparently took his word for it.

Revell and Gannaway, along with the other fifty members of the DPD CIU were members of the 488th US Army Reserve unit under Gen. Whitmyer, who reportedly said that his unit was ordered to stand down and not participate in the security for the president's visit, as they normally should have been.

But members of the unit were participating in the security of the President as members of the Dallas Police Department, there were two members of the 488th in the pilot car of the motorcade.

While most of the descriptions of the motorcade mention only the Lead Car, driven by DPD Chief Curry, and including Secret Service officers, in front of the Lead Car there was a Pilot Car, driven by 488th member Capt. Lumpkin.

According to Peter Dale Scott's Dallas COPA (2010) address, this car pulled to the side of the road in front of the TSBD and Capt. Lumpkin talked briefly to one of the three police officers assigned to traffic duty at that intersection (Huston & Elm), sixty feet below the Sixth Floor Sniper's window. Except there is no mention of this stop or what was conveyed to the cops in the official reports.

CE 767; Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XVII, page 596.
http://www.maryferre...4&relPageId=631

CE 768; Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XVII, page 605.
http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=139422

Jerry Rose deals with the pilot car
in The Dance of the Railroad Men
http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=519723
and
The Dance of the Railroad Men Reconsidered
http://www.maryferre...34&relPageId=24

The driver of the car was Deputy Chief G. L Lumpkin.

Two homicide detectives were also in the Pilot Car.

A fourth occupant was Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer

Col. Whitmeyer was the Commanding Officer of the NorthernDistrict of Texas and gave the military "stand down" order.

But Lumplin was the highest ranking reserve Col. In the Military Intelligenceand had to have given Whitmeyer this order.

Lumpkin never testified before the Warren Commission eventhough he was Deputy Chief of the Dallas Police and drove the Pilot Car. Hetestified before the HSCA in 1977.

Lt. Col. Whitmyer was due to testify in 1978.

April 18, 1978 newspaper headline "Whitmeyer found dead."

Commission Document 81.1 - AG Texas
http://www.maryferre...84&relPageId=72

Activities of pilot car on November 22, 1963.

Lumpkin driving, Turner right front
Senkel left rear, Whitemeyer center rear, Puterbauch right rear.

And introduces yet another federal intelligence/law enforcement agency into the mix -
the US Alcohol Tax Unit - who are these guys? Did they file reports or what?

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach§ion=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=22150

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach§ion=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=22151

http://jfk.ci.dallas.tx.us/15/1549-002.gif

Fay M. Turner Testimony: http://www.jfk-assas...ol7/page217.php

F. M. Turner Report: http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-001.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-002.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-003.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-004.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-005.gif;http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-006.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1549-007.gif

Billy L. Senkel: http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1548-001.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1548-002.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1548-003.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1548-004.gif; http://jfk.ci.dallas...15/1548-005.gif

Further confirmation of the occupants and locations.

http://www.maryferre...92&relPageId=17


How did the Sixth Floor Sniper Know when the Target Car would be in the Kill Zone?

I think the Pilot Car told him.

Since the Pilot Car pulled over to the curb at Houston and Elm and the passengers talked briefly to one of the three traffic and crowd
control cops standing on that corner, the passengers in the car were facing the TSBD, and the Sixth Floor Sniper's Window was sixty to eighty feet away,
or less than thirty yards on a football field. Could what is being said on the ground be heard clearly on the Sixth Floor?

Less than an hour later, a deputy sheriff called down from the same window to Capt. Fritz and told him that was the Sniper's Nest, and I don't believe he had to yell.

The exact distance can be figured out by determining the distance from the curb to the TSBD building and the height of the building
will give you two sides to the angle, the thrid side being the distance between the curb and Sixth Floor window.

Since the car was facing the TSBD the report to the policeman would have been directed towards the assassin and he
could possibly have heard it.

Or he could have just surmized that the Pilot Car was a forerunner to the motorcade and Target Car.

Did the Pilot Car also call in their location and timing of the motorcade while they were stopped there?

If so, their report would have been broacast and this report amplified by the policemen's radios in the facinity, or the radio in the car.

Do the tapes or transcripts of Channel Two indicate that the Pilot Car broadcast their locaton or the location of the motorcade during their
journey?

LUMPKIN OBIT (Thanks Robert)

George Lonnie. Lumpkin (RIP July 15, 1994

Dallas Morning News, The (TX) - July 18, 1994

Deceased Name: Services today for George Lumpkin , 40-year member of Dallas police force.

Retired Dallas police Capt. George Lumpkin, 84, died Friday of cancer. Services will be at 4 p.m. Monday at Restland Memorial Chapel in Dallas.

Mr. Lumpkin served for 40 years in the Police Department and played a significant role in the investigation of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, his family said.

"Dad was in the lead car of the motorcade," said his daughter, Maureen Stone. "He was also one of the first to reach the hospital when Kennedy was shot."

He also served 39 months in the Army during World War II, receiving the Bronze Star for taking part the capture of 30 prisoners, his daughter said.

"He captured them without killing them," Mrs. Stone said. "My father believed in not using guns unless necessary."

He retired as a colonel from the Army Reserves and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service as commandant of the Dallas Area Army Reserve School.

Other survivors include his wife, Katherine Lumpkin; son Michael Lumpkin of Dallas; sister Mildred Bunch of Arlington; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.