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…”
