The Dead Secret Service Agent Reports of 11/22/1963

[Vince Palamara]

 

[Keyvan Shahrdar]

15 hours ago, Vince Palamara said:

 

@Vince Palamara Who reported the dead secret service man first?

[Vince Palamara]

8 hours ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

@Vince Palamara Who reported the dead secret service man first?

THAT I am not sure of.

[Jeff Carter]

It is a curious anomaly. The media persons are reading from wire service printouts. So this has been fed into the reporting cycle from an official source. The dead agent is said to be some distance away from the motorcade. The story appears very early in the afternoon, then is dropped. It could be said the dead agent then morphs into the dead police officer.

Vince - did this story originate with the Secret Service or did the Service have any involvement with the dissemination of this story?

[Joseph McBride]

Here's what I wrote on this topic in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

THE DEAD SECRET SERVICE AGENT STORY

 

There is also that curious case of the dead Secret Service agent. Persistent reports that a Secret Service agent was killed in Dallas on November 22 may or may not relate to unknown activities in Oak Cliff in the period between Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s capture, the inadequately documented events at the theater, or to other strange events surrounding Tippit’s death. Dallas’s WFAA announced, “We may report this bulletin that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed here today. They were shot some distance from the area where President Kennedy was assassinated.”  All three television networks reported the agent’s death as fact, and the Associated Press was similarly quoted on WFAA-TV reporting, “A Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman were shot and killed some distance from where the President was shot.” The story was dropped by the news media after received a carefully worded “denial” (with significant holes in it) at 3:40 p.m. by Robert A. Wallace, the assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of the Secret Service: “No Secret Service man was injured in the attack on President Kennedy.” Note that this non-denial denial would not cover an agent’s death in another location that day in Dallas. And as was noted in Chapter 13, DPD Detective Marvin A. Buhk reported to Chief Curry on December 3 that Secret Service men had been involved in the hunt for the suspect in the Tippit killing.

Some have theorized that the dead agent report may have been a cover story for spiriting Kennedy’s body out of Dallas by a route other than Air Force One or that the dead agent had attempted to warn the president of the impending plot. The Dallas Morning News reported that a man had run alongside Kennedy’s limousine a few minutes before the assassination, shouting a warning before being tackled by Secret Service agents from the followup car to Vice President Johnson’s vehicle several car lengths behind the president. Vince Palamara, the leading expert on the Secret Service involvement in the assassination, has studied these matters carefully and has found anomalies and gaps in the record pertaining to some agents who might have been a candidate for the “dead agent.” One report (from an article by Penn Jones and Gary Shaw) was that a Dallas or Fort Worth agent posing as a postal inspector knew of the plot and left his office on the day of the assassination, saying, “Well, this is it,” and was never seen by his family again, although they continued to receive his paychecks. Palamara identifies this man as Chuck Robertson. Palamara also quotes the late Secret Service agent James K. Fox as saying, “We lost a man that day -- our man.” Fox, who was stationed in Washington, D.C., was asked “to get ready a detail of four to six agents to assist in retrieving the body and casket of the unnamed Secret Service agent,” reports Palamara.

 

In a transcript of a tape in which the respected Scripps-Howard reporter Seth Kantor recorded his memories shortly after the events in Dallas (reproduced in one of the Warren volumes), there is this passage about a discussion in an office in Parkland Hospital shortly after the announcement of Kennedy’s death:

 

A western union man who had been with us since we came down from from [sic] Andrews Air Force Base came into the office. A nurse asked him about a report that a Secret Service agent had been killed out on the street. He said that it was true. This was one of the immediate rumors which sprung [sic] up. It took several days for this particular rumor not to be believed in Dallas itself (fellow in Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall who got it from a friend who got it from a postman supposed to have been at the death scene that the shot and bleeding SS man was picked up and whisked away and it was all hushed up. Why? I asked. Because they even have to die in secret, he said. He and others hinted that maybe the SS man was in on the plot to kill the President.)

 

The mention of the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall Printing Company  (JCS) in Dallas is intriguing, for this was the firm for which Oswald worked from October 12, 1962 (ten days before the Cuban Missile Crisis would become public) through April 6, 1963, doing photographic work. The firm did classified jobs for the U.S. Army and Navy on maps and photographs. It is one of the many mysteries of Oswald’s story -- most likely an indication of his intelligence connections -- that he could have obtained such a  sensitive position with his record as a supposed defector to the USSR. As Armstrong writes in Harvey and Lee, “It is worth noting that while working on military jobs at JCS Oswald made no attempt to conceal his sympathies towards Cuba, Russia, and communism. He brought Russian newspapers to work, read them during his breaks, and spoke Russian with co-worker Dennis Ofstein. Apparently, no one at JCS was concerned.” That last point may not be entirely true. Oswald was fired in late March 1963 because he was “inept in this particular craft,” but not because of any other problem, according to the Warren Commission testimony of Robert L. Stovall, the company’s president. But the director of the firm’s photographic department, John G. Graef, testified that Oswald had friction with other employees and that his reading of a Russian newspaper at work “didn’t help” him avoid being discharged when business was slow.

And as for the curious history of the dead agent story, is it possible that Tippit worked clandestinely for the Secret Service or some other U.S. government agency and could have been reported to be the “dead agent” before the official story began to coalesce? The reports that a policeman was killed along with the agent, and that the agent “had been killed out on the street,” are suggestive, even if the record is vague on what might have happened. It would not have been unusual for a police officer to have operated under cover for a U.S. federal law enforcement or intelligence agency. Alternatively, given the initial confusion about an agent and a policeman being shot on the street, seemingly in the same incident, could  this have resulted from an incident, otherwise lost to history, in which Tippit, or whoever shot him, shot an agent? As was discussed in Chapter 14, the chain of evidence on Tippit’s service revolver was broken by the strange action of witness Ted Callaway.

M. S. Arnoni, who wrote some insightful early commentary on the assassination and related events, asked these questions as early as December  1, 1963, in his article “Dark Thoughts about Dark Events’ in the independent journal The Minority of One: “Was Lee Harvey Oswald a walking corpse, a fall guy, doomed even before the assassination to die? And if so, did he die after fulfilling an assassin's role, or only as a decoy? Was the assassin condemned to death by the very people who assigned him to shoot? If so, when did the execution take place -- with the shooting of Lee Oswald, or with the shooting of Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit? The first reports of the murder of Patrolman Tippit also related that a Secret Service man had been wounded; since then, nothing has been heard about that Secret Service man. What was his relation to Patrolman Tippit; and is it possible that the two were shot in a duel between them?”

I asked Jim Leavelle if he had heard anything about a Secret Service agent being killed that day in Dallas. Leavelle confirmed he had looked into the story, but thought it wasn’t true: “I’ve heard that, but I’ve asked some people about it. Nobody knows a thing about it. It’s never been brought to my attention that it happened out there where [Tippit] was. If there had been a Secret Service man hurt out there, we’d have known about it, I can assure you about that. [Forrest V.] Sorrels was chief of the Secret Service here, and we were real close. I can assure you that if there had been a Secret Service agent shot or killed or even hurt, wounded [in Dallas that day], we would have known about it. We worked together just like that.”

[Keyvan Shahrdar]

18 hours ago, Vince Palamara said:

THAT I am not sure of.

Was a SSA killed?  I have read some of your articles and it seems to be maybe.

I can't help think that this is a pre-conceived story with a SSA agent that is supposed to get killed.

[Vince Palamara]

3 hours ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

Was a SSA killed?  I have read some of your articles and it seems to be maybe.

I can't help think that this is a pre-conceived story with a SSA agent that is supposed to get killed.

Yes---it seems to be a "maybe." It could also have been a false story started in order to grant federal jurisdiction, even briefly, so the feds (FBI/Secret Service) could take the body illegally and other matters they normally would not be able to do (the murder of a president was NOT then a federal crime, but the murder of an agent WAS!).