by J. W Lateer
On December 5, 1967 while Bolden was serving his sentence at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, attorneys John Hosmer (Bolden’s Lawyers), Mark Lane (author of Rush to Judgment), and Richard V. Burnes (assistant to Jim Garrison) held a new conference in which they stated they had received information from Bolden that the Secret Service was aware of a prior assassination attempt on Kennedy in Chicago. According to the attorneys, the Secret Service had been informed that an attempt on the President would be made in Chicago which resulted in the cancellation of his visit due to safety concerns. They stated that Bolden said he and other agents had shadowed a suspect due to this report.
On March 21, 1970, Sherman Skolnick appeared on an FM radio program with Ted Weber of WTMX and stated that Bolden was falsely imprisoned to prevent him from revealing that there was a plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that they attempted to contact Bolden regarding the allegations, but he refused to comment.
The following month on April 6, Skolnick filed suit with the United States District Court in Chicago against the National Archives and Records Service stating that the agency had illegally suppressed documents that pointed to what he claimed was a plot to assassinate Kennedy at the Army-Air Force game in Chicago on November 2, 1963. His suit demanded that the Warren Commission – that stated Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy – be declared “null and void.”
Three of the eleven documents attached to the suit, (documents which Skolnick said were sent to him by an undisclosed person), were FBI reports pertaining to the assassination of Kennedy. The plaintiff also claimed that they had recently been declassified and that they related to the arrest of Thomas Arthur Vallee. According to Skolnick’s suit, Vallee was an Oswald look-alike and one of four or five people who conspired to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago, but that the attempt was aborted following a traffic stop in which Vallee was found to have a concealed rifle in his possession. Possession of a concealed rifle was likely to have been a crime in Chicago by itself.
The suit stated that the assassination attempt was rescheduled for three weeks later in Dallas. Skolnick said that the Warren Commission forwarded materials to the Archives that connected Vallee to Oswald by way of the rifle and a 1962 Ford Falcon. In response, the United States Department of Justice was reported to have “no comment” and National Archivist Marion Johnson said he had seen nothing in the Archives that connected Vallee to an assassination attempt.
Time magazine reported that “a former Secret Service agent” was among those mentioned by Skolnick. Skolnick later told Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press that a “mysterious courier” gave him a “pile of documents about the Chicago plot against Kennedy” that had been compiled by Bolden. In that interview, Skolnick claimed that the “secret documents” had been stolen from the National Archives. In June 1970, Skolnick petitioned Judge Huber Will of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for a stay of the proceedings. Skolnick said that he could not receive a fair hearing and would resume the case “when the time best suits the occasion.” On Monday, June 22, Judge Will ordered the stay.
In 1975, the allegation of a “Chicago plot” was reiterated in an issue of Chicago Independent. The author Black was reported to have drawn upon Skolnick’s research and first hand information provided in part by Bolden and in part by those “people with information about the alleged plot” who sought out Skolnick.
The Tampa Plot
Following the foiled attempt in Chicago, a second plot unfolded in Tampa, Florida.
Four days before he was killed in Dallas, President Kennedy visited Tampa. There he addressed the Steelworkers Union and then later in Miami the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA). To the latter group, Kennedy delivered a major speech on Cuba, part of which was said to have been designed to be a signal which would confirm his support for certain persons who might be involved in a possible coup in Cuba.
In the course of this trip, (which included a long motorcade that began and ended at MacDill AFB in Tampa), Kennedy met privately with the commander of MacDill, a base where a quick-strike unit was prepared to intervene in Cuba if called upon. As author Peter Dale Scott has pointed out, MacDill AFB was the recipient of the special message from a Dallas Police Department officer named Stringfellow, informing the Quick-Strike unit that the accused assassin was a Cuban Communist, a possible attempt to instigate a mobilization for an invasion of Cuba.
Also in the course of the visit to Tampa, the Secret Service and local authorities investigated a plot to shoot the President with a high powered rifle while he rode in the motorcade. The plan also had a patsy, Gilberto Lopez. Lopez was a Cuban affiliated with the FPCC, with whom Oswald was also associated. Lopez was allegedly trying to get back into Cuba, and eventually did so, via the same route Oswald allegedly tried to take, via Texas and on to Mexico City.
News of the Tampa plot was confined to a single newspaper report, and picked up by the UPI, but Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann explore this plot further and in some detail in their books.
The Tampa attempt featured even more parallels to Dallas than the Chicago Plot: They include a long presidential motorcade in an open limo, a hard left turn to slow JFK’s limo down in front of a red brick building which, like the TSBD in Dallas, had many unsecured windows. There was to be a gunman with a high-powered rifle planning to shoot from a building, and there were reports to officials of organized crime involvement. A key suspect in Tampa named Gilberto Lopez was a young white male of slender build, a government asset, and a former defector who had a Russian connection in his background. Like Oswald, Lopez was seen as apolitical or anti-Castro by some, yet had gotten into a fight over seemingly pro-Castro statements. Lopez was also linked to Oswald prior to the Tampa attempt.
But, prior to the Tampa attempt, there are reports that Oswald was in Tampa, meeting with members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, people whom the FBI would certainly call “subversives.” The alleged Oswald trip to Tampa can’t be dated precisely, but most reports place it somewhere in the few weeks leading up to the day of the November Tampa attempt.
One of the two surviving small articles mentions “a memo from the White House Secret Service dated Nov. 8 [that] reported: “Subject made statement that he will use a gun.… Subject is described as white, male, 20, slender build, etc.” That memo, cited in a November 23, 1963 article in the Tampa Tribune may no longer exist in Secret Service files. The suspect’s description in the memo matches either Gilberto Lopez described by the FBI “age 23, 5’7”, 125 lbs … fair complexion”) or Lee Harvey Oswald far better than the initial description that would be issued in Dallas four days later, after JFK was shot. The Oswald description in Dallas caused a lookout to be issued for a thirty-five-year-old man. The article in the Tampa Tribune also quoted Tampa Police Chief J.P. Mullins as saying that there were two people involved in the threat, and “he did not know if the other two persons may have followed” JFK “to Dallas.” At a time near the JFK assassination, the FBI had obtained some information through an informant about a possible assassination attempt. The information came from right-wing Minuteman operative named Joseph Milteer.
In his first interview about the subject since 1963, former Tampa Police Chief J.P. Mullins confirmed the existence of the plot to authors Waldron and Hartmann in 1996. He indicated that the threat in question was not part of a far right threat that was based on the Joseph Milteer information. Mullins didn’t recall that the Milteer threat had been shared with the Tampa police. Chief Mullins also said that they [the Tampa Police] had not been told about the recent Chicago plot to kill JFK. However, when given the full names of the two men linked to Gilberto Lopez whose last names were Rodriguez and Gonzales, Mullins thought they sounded familiar. He couldn’t say for sure. He recalled that no suspects were arrested that day, but said that if a suspect wasn’t taken “into custody on some legal pretext, they’d keep them under surveillance,” whi
ch was similar to what happened with Vallee and the other suspects in Chicago. He said that “the Secret Service gave us names to watch for, and our own Intelligence Unit had names to watch for,” but Oswald’s name “wasn’t on any [watch] list.”
Regarding the Tampa motorcade, Mullins said a “Secret Service agent told him it was the President’s longest exposure in the U.S. – the only one longer was in Berlin.” JFK’s motorcade was scheduled to go from MacDill Air Force Base to Al Lopez Field, then to downtown Tampa and the National guard Armory. It would then travel to the International Inn, and finally back to MacDill Air Force Base. According to an article about the motorcade, “the Tampa police alone supplied 200 of the department’s approximately 270 uniformed force.” In addition, “four hundred men from federal law enforcement agencies such as the U.S. Air Force also saw duty, “including law enforcement officers from the state, six counties, and the cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater,” With a total of six hundred trained professionals guarding JFK, it’s clear how serious the security concerns were.
An anonymous Tampa official told … [Waldron and Hartmann] that one of the three places that especially concerned the Secret Service was a bridge, though he didn’t understand why at the time. Once we informed him that Chicago newsmen had told a former Senate investigator that the Chicago plot involved a “planned assassination attempt from one of the overpasses,” the official said he finally understood the Secret Service’s concern about the bridge. The other two places the Secret Service was concerned about were 1) “a place where gangsters hung out” and 2) the Floridian Hotel (sometimes referred to as the Grand Floridian).
The high Florida law enforcement official identified the full name of a man linked to Gilberto Lopez and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This man “was watched closely in conjunction with JFK’s visit.” The man’s last name was “Rodriguez.” The official was aware of Gilberto Lopez, whom he called “Gilbert” and “thought he was an informant” for some agency. However, he didn’t connect Lopez at the time to the JFK threat; that would come later, after JFK’s death, when the FBI and others began investigating Lopez.
The Florida official confirmed that “JFK had been briefed he was in danger.”
One of the few Secret Service documents which have survived relating to the Tampa motorcade, because it was provided to Congressional investigators, says that “underpasses [were] controlled by police and military units, [while the] Sheriff’s office secured the roofs of major buildings in the downtown and suburban areas.”
In fact, the Minuteman extremist Joseph Milteer himself commented on the aborted hit when he spoke to covert Miami police informant William Somersett, after JFK’s death. Somersett, the informant, told investigators that Milteer “said that Kennedy could have been killed” on his trip to Florida, “but somebody called the FBI and gave the thing away, and of course, he was well guarded and everything went “pluey,” and “everybody kept quiet and waited for Texas.”
Notes:
See Ultimate Sacrifice, John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK, by Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann, which provides the best presentation of the two other assassination attempts on JFK in October-November 1963.
The Assassination of JFK: By Coincidence or Conspiracy, by Bernard Fensterwald (1977).
Dr. Jerry D Rose Stoner; An Introduction, The Fourth Decade, November 1995. This article documents the visit by Lee Harvey Oswald to the Imperial Wizard of the KKK James Venable in Atlanta.
HSCA 180-10070-10273 interview with Abraham Bolden 1-19-78, declassified 1-5-96 documents the teletype sent to the Chicago Secret Service by the FBI on 10-31-1963.
HSCA 180-10105-10393, Secret Service memo 3029-63, declassified in 1992 documents tipoff to Service about attempts against JFK other than in Dallas, i.e. Chicago and Tampa.
In Ultimate Sacrifice at p. 625, the alleged Montreal Connections of the suspects is mentioned.
HSCA report supra, p. 231 is referenced in the text with regard to Vallee.
.HSCA report supra, P 231: This citation documents the reference in the text about Vallee.
Chicago Daily News, 12-3-63 articles by writer Edwin Black document the information attributed in the text to the Chicago Daily News.
Refer to the Warren Commission Document 117 which can be found in the Mary Ferrell Foundation website describes the alleged paranoid schizophrenic condition of Vallee.
Author of Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy, by Vince Palamara at p. 72 documents the allegation of Vallee’s CIA-connected history.
HSCA 180-10071-10276, 1-19-78 interview summary of Edward Tucker as described in text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Bolden,HSCA 180-10070-0273 interview with Abraham Bolden 1-19-78, declassified 1-5-96. This source is important because it reveals some details of the two plots known to Abraham Bolden.
“The Tampa Plot in Retrospect” –(A Newspaper Article By William Kelly) This newspaper article is the slender thread which preserves proof that the Tampa plot actually took place as described in this chapter.
In Ultimate Sacrifice at p. 653, the fact is presented that neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations bothered to investigate or gather facts about the Chicago or Tampa plots.
As referenced in the text, see Ch 54 in Ultimate Sacrifice, note 6 Rory O’Connor, “Oswald Visited Tampa,” Tampa Tribune 6-24-76; phone interview with confidential high Florida law enforcement source 12-10-96; Skip Johnson and Tony Durr, “Ex-Tampan in JFK plot?,” Tampa Tribune 9-5-76.
In Ultimate Sacrifice, p. 685 the Mullin interview is documented. See Ch.56, note 8, Phone interview with J.P. Mullins 12-10-96.
Ch 56, In Ultimate Sacrifice by Waldron and Hartmann, note 13 the phone interview with confidential high Florida law-enforcement source 12-10-96 is described.
See Ch 56 of Ultimate Sacrifice, note 17 RIF 154-10002-10423 also cited by Vince Palmera discussing the surveillance of rooftops and buildings along the Tampa motorcade route.
Chapter 10
McCarthyism: Joe McCarthy and the Kennedy Family
In the period from 1949 to 1963, the political base was built which provided the background for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Of course no one knew that this tide would lead to the death of a sitting President. But the important question is not which brand of bullets killed JFK. The question is who in the U.S. Government and in Western Europe provided the political base for the act and for the cover-up. As you will see as you read on, once you figure out the above concept, then all the forensic and other details fall into place like magic!
There are a number of reasons why an explanation of the JFK assassination begins with the story of Senator Joseph McCarthy:
Working for Joe McCarthy, his committee and its successor, was the only job Robert Kennedy ever held from 1953 to 1961, when he became Attorney General, except for two or three months during that period.
McCarthy was a militant Catholic anti-Communist activist as were both Kennedy’s prior to 1959. Both Kennedy’s were involved in the McCarthy Committee in one or both of its two forms.
While militant Catholic anti-Communism was not the prime factor in the assassination, it was a necessary precedent and a major contributing factor.
The change from militant Catholic anti-Communism to a tolerant attitude toward former Communists like Alger Hiss by both Kennedys in 1959 was intolerable to the power brokers in the Senate and was considered a major betrayal by those brokers.
McCarthy was the pioneer of the 1950’s Red-baiting type of committee chairman. A parallel committee to the McCarthy Committee, the SISS committee, can be shown to be the political hub of the assassination plot. The methods and philosophy of the McCarthy Committee and the Senate SISS Committee were nearly identical and cannot be separated when seeking an understanding of the JFK assassination.
Congressman Charles Kersten of Wisconsin was a close politi
cal partner to McCarthy in Wisconsin. As we have described, Kersten later became involved in working for Eisenhower in psychological warfare and Kersten almost certainly betrayed a knowledge of the assassination before it occurred.
McCarthy was one of three militant Catholic senators from the North who managed the Catholic side of the anti-Communist alliance with Southern segregationists. The other two were Senator Pat McCarran and Senator Thomas J. Dodd. Their backgrounds and careers followed the same path and can best be understood together.
The fear of Communism began as soon as the West received news of the Russian Revolution in 1917. But this fear lay mostly in abeyance until 1945 and the victory of the Soviet Union over Hitler.
The Spanish Civil War occurred from 1936 to 1939. This war pitted Communists against Fascists in a bitter struggle to the death. But in this war, most Americans who fought battled side by side with the Communists. In the first 30 years of the history of Soviet Communism, a great many people thought of it as a well-intentioned experiment. They assumed that it would meet the fate of all similar experiments in the past. Communism, they thought, would sooner or later collapse under the sheer weight of human greed. It took a long time, but that is, of course, what eventually happened.
But as for the Catholic Church, they did not have the luxury of waiting. Communism was feeding primarily on their flocks. As the forces of Stalin rolled over Eastern Europe, they encountered mostly Catholic countries such as Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. And in these Eastern countries, there were appalling atrocities committed against Catholic clergy, since the Communists could seemingly not co-exist with Catholicism.
Against this backdrop arose the virulent anti-Communist, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Although almost every American has heard many times over about the nature of McCarthyism, most never knew that the prime motivation of McCarthy was his faithfulness to his religion. McCarthy received his first encouragement and advice from Catholic experts in international relations at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington. It is for this reason that we will examine the background of McCarthyism and how McCarthy laid the foundation of a movement that was, ironically, a major factor in the assassination of the first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy.