JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (68 page)

Two experienced Chicago police officers, Daniel Groth and Peter Schurla, were assigned the task. After watching Vallee for hours, Groth and Schurla arrested him on Saturday, November 2, at 9:10 a.m., two and a half hours before JFK was due in at O’Hare Airport. They stopped Vallee’s car at the corner of West Wilson and North Damen Avenues, as Vallee was turning south toward the president’s motorcade route. The pretense for the arrest was an improper turn signal. When the police officers found a hunting knife lying on Vallee’s front seat, they also charged him with carrying a concealed weapon.
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More significantly, in Vallee’s trunk they found three hundred rounds of ammunition.
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Groth and Schurla first took Vallee to Secret Service headquarters. There he was questioned by Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau behind closed doors in his office. The police then took Vallee to a Chicago jail.
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They had succeeded in “getting him off the street” before JFK’s visit to Chicago. But as they may have known already from intelligence sources, Vallee was no isolated threat but a pawn being moved in a much larger game.

A first clue to Thomas Arthur Vallee’s connections with intelligence agencies was the New York license plate on the 1962 Ford Falcon he was driving: 31-10RF.
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A few days after President Kennedy’s assassination, NBC News in Chicago learned about Vallee’s arrest on the same day President Kennedy had been scheduled to come to Chicago. Luke Christopher Hester, an NBC Chicago employee, asked his father-in-law, Hugh Larkin, a retired New York City police officer, to check on Vallee’s license plate. Larkin asked his old friends in the New York Police Department if they would run a background check on it. They came back to Larkin saying the license plate information was “frozen,” and that “only the FBI could obtain this information.”
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NBC News got no further. The registration for the license plate on the car Thomas Arthur Vallee was driving at the time of his arrest was classified—restricted to U.S. intelligence agencies.

The two Chicago police officers who arrested Vallee, Daniel Groth and Peter Schurla, were themselves destined for prominent roles in police intelligence activities. In 1975 when a reporter tried unsuccessfully to interview Peter Schurla about Vallee’s arrest, Schurla was a high-level intelligence official at Chicago police headquarters.
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His companion Daniel Groth’s career in intelligence had by then become more public and more notorious than Schurla’s.

At 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, six years after the arrest of Thomas Arthur Vallee, Sergeant Daniel Groth commanded the police team that broke into the Chicago apartment of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The heavily armed officers shot both men to death.
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In 1983 the Black Panther survivors of the raid and the families of Hampton and Clark were awarded $1.85 million in a lawsuit against federal, state, and Chicago officials and officers including Daniel Groth.
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Groth acknowledged under oath that his team of officers had carried out the assault on Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the specific request of the FBI.
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Northeastern Illinois University professor Dan Stern researched Daniel Groth’s background. He discovered that Groth had taken several lengthy “training leaves” from the Chicago Police Department to Washington, D.C., where Stern and other researchers believed Groth “underwent specialized counterintelligence training under the auspices of both the FBI and the CIA.”
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According to Stern, “Groth
never
had a normal [Chicago] police assignment, but was deployed all along in a counterintelligence capacity,” with an early focus on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
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From his research Stern concluded that “the CIA and the Chicago police were very tight,” and that while technically a member of the Chicago police, Daniel Groth probably worked under cover for the CIA.
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When a journalist confronted Groth and asked him point-blank, “Are you CIA?” Groth just shrugged it off.
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If Vallee was arrested by police intelligence officers, one of whom probably worked for the CIA, what was the background of Thomas Arthur Vallee himself?

To learn more about Vallee’s past, in late summer 2004 I talked with his sister, Mary Vallee-Portillo, a nurse in Chicago. She reminisced with me about her older brother, who had died sixteen years earlier. She referred to him fondly as “Tommy.” Reflecting on his arrest as a potential assassin to President Kennedy, she said, “My brother probably was set up. He was very much used.”
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Tommy Vallee had grown up as a middle child between his sisters, Margaret, two years older, and Mary, three years younger. Their French Canadian family lived in a German-Irish neighborhood in the northwest part of Chicago.
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Mary’s strongest memory of her brother was of his always wanting to be a Marine like his older cousin, Mike. “All he dreamt of,” she said, “was being a Marine.”
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At the age of fifteen, Tommy realized his dream. He ran away from home, lied about his age, and joined the Marine Corps.

Thomas Arthur Vallee was wounded in the Korean War when a mortar shell exploded near him.
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He suffered a concussion that would affect him the rest of his life. An FBI teletype on Vallee the week after Kennedy’s assassination stated that the schizophrenic ex-Marine had a prior history of mental commitment, “allegedly has a metal plate in his scalp,” and “received complete disability from the Veterans Administration.”
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After Vallee was discharged from the Marines at the age of nineteen in November1952, he used his money to buy a new car. A few days later, he got drunk in a neighborhood bar, then demolished the car in an accident.
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He suffered another terrible head injury. He was in a coma for a couple of months. His father stayed by his bed. When Thomas finally regained consciousness, he had to go through a complete rehabilitation program, learning all over again how to walk, talk, and hold a knife and fork.
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Soon after he returned home, while he was regaining the basic skills of living, his father died of a heart attack. An uncle accused Thomas of killing his father, driving him to death by his errant behavior. Mary said her brother felt deeply guilty about his father’s death. “After the accident,” she said, “my brother was never the same again.”
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In spite of his shaky health, Vallee reenlisted for a second term in the Marines in February 1955. It was another unsettling experience. His Marine Corps medical records noted his “extremely abnormal nervousness and periods of excitement in which he cannot talk to anyone. He is also said to be very hyper-active and does not get along well in the barracks . . .”
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After giving Vallee an extensive psychiatric evaluation, the Marines honorably discharged him in September 1956 for a physical disability diagnosed as “Schizophrenic Reaction, Paranoid Type #3003, Moderate, Chronic.”
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His military records show further that a Naval Speed Letter to the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery on August 6, 1956, requested a bed for him in a Veterans Administration Hospital near Chicago for an indefinite length of time.
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Thomas Vallee had been led along a trail that Lee Oswald would follow after him. In his most revealing interview, Vallee told investigative reporter Edwin Black that he had been assigned by the Marines to a U-2 base in Japan, Camp Otsu.
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Vallee thereby came under the control of the Central Intelligence Agency, which commanded the U-2, just as Oswald would come under the CIA’s control as a radar operator at another CIA U-2 base in Japan.

Vallee also told Black that he later worked with the CIA at a camp near Levittown, Long Island, helping to train Cuban exiles to assassinate Fidel Castro.
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Oswald participated in a CIA training camp with Cuban exiles by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans.
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Vallee’s close CIA connections, like Oswald’s, help to explain how he, too, came to be employed at a site over a presidential parade route. Thomas Arthur Vallee and Lee Harvey Oswald, two men under the CIA’s thumb for years, were being set up, one after the other, as scapegoats in two prime sites for killing Kennedy.

In August 1963 as Oswald was preparing to move from New Orleans back to Dallas, Vallee moved from New York City back to Chicago.
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Just as Oswald got a job in a warehouse right over Kennedy’s future motorcade route in Dallas, so, too, did Vallee get a job in a warehouse right over Kennedy’s future motorcade route in Chicago. Like Oswald in Dallas (before his summer in New Orleans), Vallee found employment as a printer. He was hired by IPP Litho-Plate, located at 625 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago.

With the help of a friendly real estate agent, I have stood on the roof of the building in which Thomas Arthur Vallee worked in November 1963. The view from 625 West Jackson was strikingly similar to the view I had from the Texas School Book Depository, during a trip I made to Lee Harvey Oswald’s workplace in Dallas.

When I visited 625 West Jackson Boulevard in the summer of 2001, the old eight-storied building had been remodeled for loft apartment dwellers. According to its Chicago building code inspectors’ records, the building I was standing on dated back to at least 1913.
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From its roof I could look down and over to where JFK’s presidential limousine had been scheduled to make a slow turn up from the Northwest Expressway (today ironically the Kennedy Expressway) exit ramp onto West Jackson on November 2, 1963. It was analogous to the slow curve the limousine would make in Dallas in front of the Texas School Book Depository three weeks later. In the Chicago motorcade, after proceeding one more block, President Kennedy would have passed by Vallee’s workplace, just as he would in fact pass by Oswald’s workplace in Dallas three weeks later.

Vallee’s location at IPP Litho-Plate actually gave him a nearer, clearer view of the November 2 Chicago motorcade than Oswald’s so-called “sniper’s nest” did of the November 22 Dallas motorcade. Oswald’s job was on the sixth floor. Vallee’s work site, three floors lower than Oswald’s, put him in the culpable position of having an unimpeded shot at a president passing directly below him. At the same time, the unidentified snipers in the Chicago plot could have shot Kennedy from hidden vantage points and then escaped, leaving Vallee to take the blame.

Thomas Vallee had two people in particular to thank for his not becoming the scapegoat in a presidential assassination that almost occurred beneath his Chicago workplace. Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland, a member of the Chicago Police Department, was the first intervening angel who saved Vallee from suffering what would soon become Oswald’s fate. Years after Moyland retired, with his health failing, he confided in his son the story of his salvific encounter with Thomas Arthur Vallee. Even then, he added cautiously, “You probably can’t repeat it, but you ought to know it.”
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The U.S. Treasury Department, he said, had for some reason forbidden him to share the experience with anyone.
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Yet the story seemed innocent enough.

In the fall of 1963, Lieutenant Moyland had the habit of eating at a cafeteria on Wilson Avenue in Chicago, where he knew the manager. One day in late October, the manager alerted the officer in plainclothes to a regular customer who had been making threatening remarks about President Kennedy, due to visit Chicago within the week. The manager told Moyland when the threatening customer usually came in. Moyland decided to wait for him at the appropriate time. When the manager indicated that this was the man, Moyland took his tray over to Thomas Vallee’s table, sat down with him, and engaged him in conversation.
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Moyland sized up Vallee quickly as a damaged, imbalanced personality. He also realized Vallee probably had weapons in his possession, as would soon be confirmed.
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He told the man firmly that nothing good could come from the remarks he was making about President Kennedy. His behavior could in fact lead to serious consequences, beginning with anyone like himself who talked and acted in such a way. As Berkeley Moyland described this confrontation later to his son, he said the man across the table listened to him soberly, especially when Moyland identified himself as a police officer.
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After leaving the cafeteria, Lieutenant Moyland phoned the Secret Service with a warning about Vallee.
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He was told that the Secret Service would take care of the situation. As a result of Moyland’s tip, Vallee was, as we have seen, investigated and placed under police surveillance. However, it was not Moyland but an FBI informant named “Lee” whose alert disrupted the more critical four-man rifle team that represented the real threat to Kennedy, and thus to potential patsy Vallee as well.