Peter Dale Scott

William Kelly · November 22, 2010

Tom: According to the info in this book, LBJ and Hoover lived on the same side of the same street, with two houses

in between their homes. Google driving directions says their addresses were 171 feet apart.

Quote

http://books.google....ington.&f=false

Driving directions to 4921 30th Pl NW, Washington D.C., DC 20008

5 secs

30th Pl NW

171 ft

4936 30th Pl NW

Washington, DC 20008

1. Head south on 30th Pl NW

171 ft

4921 30th Pl NW

Washington D.C., DC 20008

Thanks for that Tom. So my speculative theory that LBJ took a nocturnal stroll 171 feet over to J.E. Hoover's pad on the night of the assassination just might hold water.

Tom, what is your source for the 4921 30th St. NW

and 4936 30th Place NW addersses

Jerry Blaine in TKD says LBJ's residence the Elms was at 4040 52nd St. NW.

I checked both out on Google maps:

492130th St.NW

4936 30th Place NW

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=J.+E.+Hoover%27s+residence+Washington+DC&hl=en&gbv=2&prmd=b&um=1&biw=1345&bih=435&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

4040 52nd

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&biw=1362&bih=474&gbv=2&q=4040+52nd+St.+NW+Washington+DC&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

And its quite clear that these residential homes are set back with plenty of back yards that connect with each other, so its quite plausible that LBJ could have walked over to visit JEH on the night of the assassination, at least from where I'm sitting.

BK

November 22, 2010

...Tom, what is your source for the 4921 30th St. NW

and 4936 30th Place NW addersses

Jerry Blaine in TKD says LBJ's residence the Elms was at 4040 52nd St. NW.

I checked both out on Google maps:

492130th St.NW

4936 30th Place NW

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=J.+E.+Hoover%27s+residence+Washington+DC&hl=en&gbv=2&prmd=b&um=1&biw=1345&bih=435&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

4040 52nd

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&biw=1362&bih=474&gbv=2&q=4040+52nd+St.+NW+Washington+DC&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

And its quite clear that these residential homes are set back with plenty of back yards that connect with each other, so its quite plausible that LBJ could have walked over to visit JEH on the night of the assassination, at least from where I'm sitting.

BK

I'm sorry, Bill, I am wrong, Blaine is correct.:

http://www.suite101.com/content/homes-of-presidents-before-they-became-president-a139476

Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy

Located just a few blocks from the Nixons' Tilden Street home, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson lived in this gated chauteau-style mansion at 4040 52nd Street N.W., called "The Elms," while Johnson served as John F. Kennedy's vice president. The future president reportedly joked that "Every time somebody calls it a chateau, I lose 50,000 votes back in Texas." He returned to this home the night of November 22, 1963, not long after being sworn in as president following Kennedy's assassination in Dallas earlier that day.

CORRECTION.(NATION)(CORRECTION) - The Washington Times (Washington ...

(NATION)(CORRECTION) ... find The Washington Times (Washington, DC) ... gave an incorrect sale price for Lyndon B. Johnson's home at 4921 30th Place NW. ...

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-159471105.html

On This Spot: Pinpointing the Past in Washington, D.C. - Google Books Result

Douglas E. Evelyn, Paul Dickson, S. J. Ackerman - 2008 - History - 307 pages

... as well that Lyndon B. Johnson lived at 4921 30th Place when he was Senate ... Cleveland ignited the first true Washington media frenzy from this spot, ...

http://books.google.com/books?id=y2DspYRi7G4C&pg=PA259&lpg=PA259&dq=%224921+30th+Place%22+Washington+dc&source=bl&ots=lqZcMc3DzO&sig=X1mBWkVI8VK31MMh5Bue6GVNyk8&hl=en&ei=j5bqTP6OJMGblgePy6mrCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Architectural drawings for alterations to a house for Senator and ...

Architectural drawings for alterations to a house for Senator and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, 4921 30th Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. ...

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95859671/

November 26, 2010

Tom: According to the info in this book, LBJ and Hoover lived on the same side of the same street, with two houses

in between their homes. Google driving directions says their addresses were 171 feet apart.

Quote

http://books.google....ington.&f=false

Driving directions to 4921 30th Pl NW, Washington D.C., DC 20008

5 secs

30th Pl NW

171 ft

4936 30th Pl NW

Washington, DC 20008

1. Head south on 30th Pl NW

171 ft

4921 30th Pl NW

Washington D.C., DC 20008

Thanks for that Tom. So my speculative theory that LBJ took a nocturnal stroll 171 feet over to J.E. Hoover's pad on the night of the assassination just might hold water.

Of course Lyndon Johnson was going over to Hoover's house on the night of the assassination to get the cover up gameplan going. He was sneaking through the backyards of 2 homes to get there. Then LBJ almost gets killed sneaking back to his own home, almost shot in 2 by Jerry Blaine. This is completely consistent with LBJ behavior. Often, LBJ would go outside to take a piss, rather than use a toilet.

As for J. Edgar Hoover knowing about the JFK assassination ahead of time, being a plotter, I bet he was! That does not necessarily mean he would know all about the CIA hijinx to make the murder of JFK a provocation to go to war with Cuba, which is what I think it was.

William Kelly · November 26, 2010

Tom: According to the info in this book, LBJ and Hoover lived on the same side of the same street, with two houses

in between their homes. Google driving directions says their addresses were 171 feet apart.

Quote

http://books.google....ington.&f=false

Driving directions to 4921 30th Pl NW, Washington D.C., DC 20008

5 secs

30th Pl NW

171 ft

4936 30th Pl NW

Washington, DC 20008

1. Head south on 30th Pl NW

171 ft

4921 30th Pl NW

Washington D.C., DC 20008

Thanks for that Tom. So my speculative theory that LBJ took a nocturnal stroll 171 feet over to J.E. Hoover's pad on the night of the assassination just might hold water.

Of course Lyndon Johnson was going over to Hoover's house on the night of the assassination to get the cover up gameplan going. He was sneaking through the backyards of 2 homes to get there. Then LBJ almost gets killed sneaking back to his own home, almost shot in 2 by Jerry Blaine. This is completely consistent with LBJ behavior. Often, LBJ would go outside to take a piss, rather than use a toilet.

As for J. Edgar Hoover knowing about the JFK assassination ahead of time, being a plotter, I bet he was! That does not necessarily mean he would know all about the CIA hijinx to make the murder of JFK a provocation to go to war with Cuba, which is what I think it was.

Since LBJ had moved to the Elms after living adjacent to JEH in his old neighborhood, at the time of the assassintion they lived about a mile and a half apart, so my speculation that LBJ was visiting Hoover was incorrect.

I do believe however, that he originally moved to the 30th Pl.NW residence because of Hoover, and that he probably moved to the Elms in the elite Spring Valley neighborhood for the same reason - it was close to a friend who he wanted to live near. So if anybody wants to check out who those few neighbors were, perhaps LBJ did visit one of them on the night of the assassination.

Even though the Elms had 9 bathrooms, LBJ often did take a leak whenever and whereever he pleased, so maybe he did just go outside to take a piss. In a story related by one former agent to Phil Melanson, when LBJ once took a leak on a Secret Service agent's trousers, when he was informed he was pissing on the agent, LBJ responded, "That's my perogative."

I have posted two more blog spots on LBJ's residence The Elms, with photos, and the last link goes to a google map.

http://jfkcountercou...dence-elms.html

http://jfkcountercou...d-st-nw-dc.html

Edited November 26, 2010 by William Kelly

William Kelly · November 27, 2010

Key JFK assassination elements of PDS's Dallas COPA talk:

Provocation-Deceptions from Army Intelligence Reserve in Dallas, 11/22/1963

To begin with, we know that in Dallas, on November 22, there were people inside the military who falsified their reporting of the Kennedy assassination to create the false impression (or what I have called the "phase-one story") of an enemy attack.

Provocation-Deceptions from Army Intelligence Reserve in Dallas, 11/22/1963

To begin with, we know that in Dallas, on November 22, there were people inside the military who falsified their reporting of the Kennedy assassination to create the false impression (or what I have called the "phase-one story") of an enemy attack.

I have written before about these phase-one stories from Dallas concerning the JFK assassination, but I did not realize until recently that all of them came from a single Army Intelligence Reserve unit.

As these deceptions are immediately post-assassination, they do not in isolation establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May that produced a menu of "fabricated provocations" for the Joint Chiefs.

In 1977 I tried but failed to draw one such false report to the attention of the House Committee on Assassinations. This was an army cable reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman:

Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party." 31.

The cable sent on November 22 from the Fourth Army Command in Texas to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba. 32.

I knew before that Stringfellow's superior officer, Captain W.P. Gannaway, was a member of Army Intelligence Reserve. 33. Later Ed Coyle, himself a warrant officer of the 112th Intelligence Group, testified to the Assassinations Records Review Board that all the officers in the DPD's Intelligence Section were in army intelligence. 34.

Actually they were almost certainly in the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas: Jack Crichton , the head of the 488th, revealed in an oral history that there were "about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department." 35.

The Stringfellow message was an example of a phase-one report in the Dallas investigation: a deception report incriminating, falsely, either Cuba or the Soviet Union. It was not isolated. In Deep Politics I showed how it was supported by a concatenation of false reports about Oswald's alleged rifle, and specifically reports indicating, falsely, that Marina Oswald presumed Oswald's rifle in Dallas to be the rifle he owned in Russia. 36. (Marina's actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: "I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles.") 37.

On the basis of such false phase-one stories, Dallas Deputy District Attorney Bill Alexander reportedly prepared "to indict Oswald for killing the President 'in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.'" 38.

Evidence of a Provocation-Deception Plot Involving the Kennedy Assassination

Meanwhile, in Washington, the post-assassination phase-one stories out of Dallas were augmented by a more serious item of pre-assassination false evidence. A letter purporting to be from Oswald, mailed from Irving, Texas on November 12 to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, was intercepted by the FBI. In this letter, the writer spoke of "my meetings [plural] with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City." The letter also alluded suggestively to the lack of time there "to complete our business." Even more alarmingly, the author revealed his accurate knowledge that the Consul in the Cuban Embassy had been "replaced." 39.

This Kostin letter was completely unlike any other written by Oswald; to begin with, it was not handwritten but typed. For the FBI to verify whether Oswald was the originator of the letter, they should have tested the letter against the Ruth Paine typewriter on which he had allegedly written it. But there is no public record that this was ever done. This omission, along with much other evidence, suggests that the letter was a false artifact, or, as I would now say, part of a provocation-deception plot. 40.

The Kostin letter dovetailed neatly with another piece of false pre-assassination evidence: a report out of Mexico City, indicating that Oswald had visited a KGB agent in the Soviet Embassy there named Valeriy Kostikov. The evidence for this visit was clearly false; it relied on the tape of an alleged phone call by Oswald which in fact had been made by someone else.41. We have documentary evidence that one day after the President's murder this tape was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other reports, including cables claiming -- falsely -- that the tape had already been destroyed before the assassination. 42.

There are a number of anomalies in both the FBI and CIA handling of Oswald in the weeks just prior to the assassination, such as the CIA's withholding of important information about Oswald from the FBI. As one of the relevant CIA officers (Jane Roman) conceded years later in an interview, there was probably an "operational reason" for the CIA to have withheld important information about Oswald from the FBI. 43.

The CIA's operational interest in Oswald was conceivably part of an operation directed against an enemy target, such as Fidel Castro. But the false Kostin letter, and the false Kostikov phone call, cannot be attributed to such an operation. These were provocation-deceptions designed to deceive, not the enemy, but an American audience, about the assassination in Dallas that had not yet occurred.

The Ubiquitous Shadow of the 488th Intelligence Reserve Unit

The explosive phase-one theory swiftly died, but did not lose its historical relevance. It led to the perceived risk that right-wing elements, such as Senator Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, would provoke a war with Cuba and possibly Russia. This fear became Johnson's excuse for federalizing the murder case and persuading Earl Warren and Richard Russell to join the Warren Commission.44. Thus was established the official phase-two explanation, that Oswald was a misfit who acted alone.

Of interest still today is the coincidence that the same the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit helped generate the false Marina story, as well as the false Stringfellow report. The interpreter who first supplied the Marina story, Ilya Mamantov, was selected as the result of a phone call between Deputy Police Chief George Lumpkin and Jack Crichton.45. We have already seen that Crichton commanded the 488th; and Lumpkin, in addition to being the Deputy Police Chief, was also a deputy commander of the 488th under Crichton. 46.

John Crichton was the kind of figure Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point described as a "connector....people with a special gift for bringing the world together." 47. Some of his contacts are figures who should be familiar to students of the JFK assassination. His superior in the Army Reserves, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, was on 11/22 in the pilot car of the Kennedy motorcade along with DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin; the pilot car is of interest because of its unexplained stop in front of the Texas School Book Depository.48. D.H. "Dry Hole" Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository, was a director of Crichton's firm Dorchester Gas Producing.49.

Crichton, an oil engineer and corporation executive, also doubled as a member of the Dallas overworld. Although his 488th intelligence unit consisted almost 50 percent of Dallas policemen, Crichton also used it as a venue in the late 1950s to conduct "a study of Soviet oil fields;" and in the 1990s Crichton would himself explore the oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet Union.50. Also interested in Soviet oil reserves at this time were Ilya Mamantov's employers and personal friends, the wealthy Pew family in Dallas who were owners of Sunoco. By 2009 the second largest source of crude for Sunoco (after Western Africa) was Central Asia, supplying 86,000 barrels of crude a day. 51.

But Crichton's most significant function as a connector on 11/22 may have been in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center under the patio of the Dallas Health and Science Museum. As Russ Baker reports, "Because it was intended for 'continuity of government' operations during an attack, it was fully equipped with communications equipment." 52. A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:

This Emergency Operating Center is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan. 53.

In an earlier draft of this talk I attempted to describe the central importance of America's emergency communications network (or so-called Doomsday communications network) in four of our country's recent provocation-deception plots: 11/22, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. If one part of the government is deceiving another, it needs its own alternative network to do so. Oliver North, for example, used just such an anti-terrorist network, codenamed Flashboard, to conduct the Iran-Contra arms operations for which he was ultimately fired. 54.

There is not time today to develop this theme, other than to note the importance of Crichton's access to it. But others beside myself have pointed to the meta-importance of those charged with overseeing the Doomsday communications network, known most recently as the Continuity of Government (COG) network. James Mann, for example, has referred to the COG network overseers as "part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting." 55.

The DPD-Army Connection Reconsidered

I devoted a whole chapter of my book Deep Politics to the Dallas Police-Army Intelligence connection. But I now think that I seriously misinterpreted its significance, by seeing its phase-one propensity as an example of right-wing Texas divergence from the phase-two inclination of those responsible for running the country. Today we know that the phase-one zeal in Dallas to implicate Castro, by the use of deceptive falsehoods, had also characterized the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.

Researcher Larry Haapanen has discovered the 488th seems to have had its own direct chain of command linking it to Washington. In an esoteric publication entitled The Military Order of World Wars (Turner Publishing Company, 1997, p. 120), he found that Crichton "commanded the 488th MID (Strategic), reporting directly to the Army Chief of Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency." 56. And in 1970 Haapanen was told by Crichton's commander in the Texas Army Reserve, Lt. Col. Whitmeyer, that Crichton's unit did its summer training at the Pentagon.

It is now clear that Stringfellow's claims about Oswald as a Communist Party visitor to Cuba, though clearly false, fell well within the guidelines for a provocation-deception as set out in the Northwoods and May 1963 documents. All this Cuban deception planning was in support of JCS OPLANS 312 (Air Attack in Cuba) and 316 (Invasion of Cuba). These were not theoretical exercises, but actively developed operational plans which the JCS were only too eager to execute. As they told Kennedy, "We are not only ready to take any action you may order in Cuba, we are also in an excellent condition world-wide to counter any Soviet military response to such action." 57.

In other words, they were prepared for a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia; even though the JCS, as Air Force General Leon Johnson told the National Security Council in September 1963, believed this would probably result in "at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR." 58.

At the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, according to Khruschchev's memoir, Robert Kennedy told the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin:

The President is in a grave situation and does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba…. Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control." 59.

Phil Melanson – The Secret Service – Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency Carroll & Graf, 2002/2005) [http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/11/secret-service-hidden-history.html ]

The SS Protective Research Section (PRS) and the Dallas PD Criminal Intelligence Section (CIS)

….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 a 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, although 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 week 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 promoted the Service to pay “special attention to extremist groups known to be active in the Dallas area.”

….The real question was why Oswald was not brought to the attention of the Secret Service by the FBI, who did have a file on him and knew that he was in Dallas….The FBI’s interest in Oswald was as a potential subversive, a security risk, not as a violence-prone potential assassin…Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty had interviewed both Oswald and his wife Marina. Oswald resented these interviews and had allegedly written a note to Hosty – the contents of which are not known for certain – warning him not to annoy Marina. The note was destroyed by Agent Hosty shortly after the assassination…

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 (Alpha 66) lay with the local police. Even though the Service’s protective research section had files on more than forty thousand persons, the agency depended in large part on local police for “identifying” and “neutralizing” potentially dangerous persons in the area to be visited by the president. Documents reveal that operational responsibility 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, headed by Lt. Jack Revill.

In and around Dallas, the Criminal Intelligence Section investigated fourteen groups, including the Klu Klux Klan, the Black Muslims, and the local Nazi Party. 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 visit] been successful 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 for the president’s visit, errors that cannot be laid upon the Secret Service [bK – or JFK]. 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 persons who might threaten or embarrass the president. The Dallas detectives compiled a list of four hundred names, but so broadly was the net cast that four dozen persons who belonged to the Young People’s Socialists 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…

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 the 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-enterprise system against Oswald’s leftist remarks. The ACLU was under surveillance 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 in the 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 that Kennedy had refused to provide U.S. air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion; many exiles held him personally responsible for their disastrous 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 his 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 Dallas reported that the head of the Dallas chapter, Manuel Rodriguez, “was known to be violently anti-President Kennedy.” According to another Warren Commission document that was accidently released in 1976 while it was still classified, Rodriguez was “apparently a survivor of the Bay of Pigs.”

Although the police Criminal Intelligence Section had missed Alpha-66 and its leader, another law enforcement unit with less intelligence gathering capacity, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, stumbled onto 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 of the day of after. The group gathering at the house was actually Alpha-66.

The confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that Manuel Rodriguez, the head of the Dallas chapter, bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, a fact that was independently confirmed by the FBI. The Bureau checked into a report that Oswald had been in Oklahoma on November 17, 1963, accompanied by several Cubans, and discovered that the Oklahoma witnesses had seen Rodriguez, not Oswald. According to an FBI memorandum signed by J. Edgar Hoover, Rodriguez was five feet nine inches, 145 pounds, with brown hair; Oswald’s autopsy report listed him as five feet nine inches, 150 pounds, 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 F. Kennedy case conducted by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-78.

Secretly recorded at a meeting of the Dallas John Birch Society the month before the assassination, the tape caught an anti-Castro Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs survivor – though not a member of Alpha-66 – denouncing Kennedy – “Get him out. Get him out. The quicker, the sooner the better. He’s doing all kind of deals. Mr. Kennedy is kissing Mr. Khruschev. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kissed Castro too. I wouldn’t even call him “President” Kennedy. He stinks. 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 meeting the 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 Criminal Intelligence Section’s failure to discover or report 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 that may have well contributed to the 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 well might have tightened precautions.

Not long before the Dallas trip, the Service had received word of a plot to assassinate 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 commando 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, 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 failure in the gathering of protective 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...

William Kelly · November 27, 2010