JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (95 page)

Looking out the window at the runway disappearing beneath him, Vinson reflected on the flight’s strange beginning and his own anonymity. Whenever he had hitched a ride before with the Air Force, the crew chief had always asked him to sign the “manifest,” or log. This flight didn’t even have a crew chief, much less a manifest.
[492]
Nor did the pilot or co-pilot (if that’s what the second man in the cockpit was) give him the usual friendly greeting. His reception had been total silence from the two men now flying the C-54 due west.

At a location Vinson thought was somewhere over Nebraska, he suddenly heard an unemotional voice say over the intercom:

“The president was shot at 12:29.”
[493]

Immediately after the flatly given announcement, the plane banked into a sharp left turn. It began heading south.

About 3:30 p.m. Central Time, Vinson saw on the horizon the skyline of a city he was familiar with: Dallas.

The plane turned and came in over Dallas in a southeast direction. It landed abruptly in a rough, sandy area alongside the Trinity River. It was not a runway. Vinson thought it looked like a road under construction. Dust blew up, as the C-54 taxied around in a U-turn and came to a stop. The engines kept running.

Through the window Vinson saw a tool shed of the type used by highway construction crews, perhaps four by six feet in size, in a large, open, sandy area. Low cliffs stood at a distance. Across the river to the north was the Dallas skyline. Two men were running toward the plane from a jeep, which then backed out of Vinson’s sight.
[494]

One of the plane’s pilots came back and unlatched the passenger door. The two men came aboard. Vinson watched as the men passed his seat without looking or speaking to him. They were wearing off-white, beige coveralls, the type used by highway workers. They carried nothing. The men sat down right behind the cockpit. They said nothing to the man who let them on the plane or to each other. To Vinson it was obvious they were following orders, which must have included keeping silent about what they were doing.
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The taller of the two men, 6’ to 6’1”, weighing 180 to 190 pounds, looked Latino. Vinson thought he was Cuban. The shorter man, 5’7” to 5’9”, weighing about 150 to 160 pounds, was Caucasian. When Vinson watched the televised events from Dallas later that weekend, he recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as identical to the shorter man he had seen board the plane.
[496]

Without ever having stopped its engines, the C-54 took off from the sandy area in a northwest direction. Carrying the man who looked like Oswald, the plane soon left Dallas—and the jailed, about-to-be-killed Lee Harvey Oswald—far behind.

A little after dusk, the C-54 landed on a runway. Going by what he was told at Andrews, Robert Vinson continued to think the plane’s destination was Lowry Air Base in Denver.

As soon as the C-54’s engines were shut off, the two men in the cockpit emerged quickly. They rushed past Vinson out the door of the plane. The two passengers from Dallas hastened after them. Vinson was left alone in the aircraft, just as he had been at the beginning.

“That was strange, very strange,” Vinson said years later in an interview. “I couldn’t understand why they were in such a rush. They just bailed out.”
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Robert Vinson descended from the plane into the gathering darkness. There was no one in sight. Nothing looked familiar. Across the runway he could see a building with lights in it. Inside he found a lone Air Policeman on duty.

“Hi,” said Vinson, “Can you tell me where I am?”

“You’re at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico,” the AP said.
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“I thought I was going to Denver, Colorado. How can I get downtown and catch a bus?”

The Air Policeman told him he couldn’t go anywhere because the base was on alert. No one could come in or go out.

Vinson thought that was strange because the C-54 had just come in. How had their plane managed to enter a base that no one was allowed to enter? It didn’t occur to him that the arrival of their plane could have been the reason for the base’s closure to everyone else. That would explain why Vinson found the runway area deserted. At least one of the C-54 passengers was not supposed to be seen by anyone. But Vinson had seen him and had even flown out of Dallas with him, though he didn’t know the significance of the man whom he had seen.

The AP said there was nothing for Vinson to do except take a seat in the waiting room until the alert was lifted. After a couple of hours, the AP told him the alert was over and gave him directions to a bus stop.
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By the next morning, Saturday, November 23, Robert Vinson was at home in Colorado Springs, telling Roberta the story of his strange flight. Although they didn’t understand what lay behind it all, they both felt it could be dangerous. They agreed not to discuss it with anyone else.

That night, while watching the TV coverage from Dallas, Robert shook his head in disbelief. He said to Roberta, “That guy looks just like the little guy who was on the airplane.”

“Are you nuts?” she said. “It couldn’t be him. He’s in jail.”

“I swear that’s the little guy who got on the plane.”

“Well,” she said, “keep quiet about it.”
[500]

After Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered the following day, Robert Vinson kept quiet for thirty years about the little guy he saw get on the plane in Dallas. However, his silence could not erase the name and serial number he had given the airman at the Andrews check-in counter the morning of November 22. No doubt the two men who got on the plane in Dallas, and the two in the cockpit, were thoroughly debriefed. They would have referred to the other member of their team, a man as silently obedient to the plan as they had been, who was on the C-54 before any of them got on and until after they got off. One can imagine the debriefer’s shock: What other man?

The subsequent discovery that it was Air Force Sergeant Robert Vinson who was the unauthorized passenger in the flight from Dallas led, the Vinsons suspected, to further developments in their lives.

In the spring of 1964, after Vinson was promoted to technical sergeant, a friend told Robert and Roberta that their neighbors were being questioned by the FBI about what kind of people the Vinsons were and what they talked about. Not long after, Robert was ordered by his commanding officer to sign a new secrecy agreement. Roberta was also asked to fill out a personal history statement and sign a secrecy agreement, the first time she was ever required to do so as an Air Force wife.
[501]

On November 25, 1964, Robert Vinson received orders to go to Washington, D.C., and report to a telephone number “in conjunction with a Special Project.”
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When he arrived in D.C. and phoned the number, he received instructions that resulted in his spending five days at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA put him through a series of psychological and physical tests. At their conclusion, he was interviewed in a conference room by a half-circle of men in semi-darkness. They asked Vinson to work for them. He refused, saying he wanted to retire from the Air Force and take a job in Colorado Springs. The CIA men offered him lucrative inducements, which he again refused. They finally let him go.
[503]

As it turned out, they had not let him go at all.

Three months later, Robert Vinson was again ordered to report to a telephone number for the CIA, this time in Las Vegas, Nevada. The difference was he was no longer being
asked
to work for the CIA. He was
told
to work for the CIA. The Air Force had reassigned him to a top-secret CIA project, the Blackbird SR 71 spy plane, at an air base hidden in the Nellis Mountains, forty miles northwest of Las Vegas.
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In more recent years, after the base was closed especially because of radioactive contamination from the Nevada Test Site, this former CIA testing area was identified as Site 51.
[505]

On his new assignment, Vinson would soon learn that the CIA’s projects out of Site 51 included experimental aircraft shaped like saucers. The same was true at the CIA’s other base at Roswell, New Mexico, where the C-54 carrying the second Oswald had landed. Both Site 51 and Roswell were home to the “flying saucers” that people saw periodically in the area. They in fact came not from outer space but from the CIA, which encouraged the flying saucer reports as a convenient cover story for U.S. experimental aircraft.
[506]

For the final year and a half of his Air Force enlistment, Vinson served as the administrative supervisor for base supply of the CIA’s SR-71/Blackbird spy plane project at Site 51.
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It was obvious to Vinson he was not so uniquely qualified for this position that the CIA would for that reason alone pluck him out of the NORAD staff in Colorado Springs, only eighteen months before his retirement, and insert him into their Nevada project. The Agency had other reasons for asking the Air Force to reassign him. He and Roberta agreed the CIA was keeping both of them under close observation, while paying Vinson off for his continuing silence with the CIA’s monthly cash payments as a bonus to his Air Force salary.
[508]
Nothing explicit, however, was ever said to him about his inadvertent presence on the flight from Dallas.

While Robert Vinson was working at Site 51, he saw a C-54 like the one that flew the second Oswald out of Dallas. On its tail was the same rust-brown graphic of an egg-shaped earth, crossed by white grid marks, that he had seen on the C-54 he boarded at Andrews. An Air Force sergeant at Site 51 confirmed the source of the plane he was looking at.

“CIA,” he said.
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Robert Vinson’s CIA employment ceased with his retirement from the Air Force on October 1, 1966.
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Although the CIA had paid him well to keep silent, he and Roberta “felt as if they’d been freed from a plush prison.”
[511]

Out of fear for his life and concern for his military retirement benefits, Vinson maintained his silence during the twenty years he worked in Wichita, Kansas, first as an accountant, then as an administrative assistant and supervisor in the Wichita Public Works Department. In 1976 when he asked a lawyer friend in Wichita if he should reveal his secret, the lawyer said, “Don’t tell a soul. For your own safety.”
[512]
Yet Vinson’s conscience continued to push him toward speaking out on what he knew.

After Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992, mandating the disclosure of government records on the assassination, Vinson consulted with his member of Congress. Representative Dan Glickman of Wichita said to his relief that the new law freed him from his secrecy agreement when it came to assassination information.
[513]

On November 23, 1993, Robert Vinson told the story of his flight from Dallas to news anchor Larry Hatteberg on Wichita’s KAKE-TV Channel 10 News. Viewers gave “an incredible response” to Vinson’s story, Hatteberg told me, as they have to its several re-runs on the Wichita channel.
[514]
One of those responding initially to Vinson was Wichita civil liberties lawyer James P. Johnston, who had studied the Kennedy assassination. Johnston volunteered his legal assistance to Vinson to help bring his testimony to the public’s and the government’s attention. Vinson then offered to testify before the Assassination Records Review Board created by the JFK Act, but was never called to do so. In 2003 James Johnston and journalist Jon Roe co-authored their book
Flight from Dallas
, describing Robert Vinson’s experience in detail.

On a Dallas map sent to him by Johnston, Vinson identified the C-54’s landing area as “the Trinity River Flood Plain just south of downtown Dallas.”
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The particular location he marked out as the landing strip, between Cadiz Street Viaduct and Corinth Street Viaduct, was 4,463 feet long.
[516]

James Johnston found a C-54 expert to consult, retired Air Force Major William Hendrix, who flew the C-54 on over one hundred missions during the Berlin airlift. In response to Johnston’s query on what the C-54 could do, Hendrix wrote: “It is my personal opinion that a C-54 could easily have landed in the Trinity Flood Plain and have taken off therefrom, the depicted area.”
[517]

In a colossal CIA blunder, Robert Vinson’s providential presence on the second Oswald’s flight from Dallas has enabled us to see the planning for the Oak Cliff follow-up to the assassination. First, in Dealey Plaza, came the killing of JFK by snipers firing from the grassy knoll and the Texas School Book Depository. Then in Oak Cliff, the scenario continued with Oswald’s “escape” in a taxi, while the second Oswald was driven into the same area in the Rambler station wagon by the man Roger Craig described as “a husky looking Latin”
[518]
—corresponding to Robert Vinson’s description of the Oswald companion who got on the C-54, standing 6’ to 6’1”, weighing 180 to 190 pounds, whom Vinson, like Craig, said looked Latino, probably Cuban.
[519]
Officer J. D. Tippit was then shot to death by a man who witnesses said looked like Oswald. After Tippit’s murder and Oswald’s capture, in a shell game featuring the Oswald lookalike, he and his Cuban-looking companion flew out of Oak Cliff on the CIA plane.