Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (31 page)

Levine was born in Russia and spoke Russian fluently. He spent an intensive week coaching Marina Oswald just prior to her first session before the Warren Commission on February 3, 1964.
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Since the end of World War II, Levine had become involved with what was then known as the China Lobby, a group of supporters for Nationalist China opposing Mao and the spread of Communism into China. Editing a magazine on behalf of the China Lobby called
Plain Talk
, Levine published a stream of articles analyzing the dangers to the United States from China after its fall to the Communist Chinese following Mao’s revolution, which began in 1949. Levine’s history as an anti-Communist also included credits for encouraging Whittaker Chambers to speak out against Alger Hiss. James Herbert Martin, who was then acting as Marina Oswald’s literary agent and manager, believed that Levine’s motivation at the time was to tie Oswald in with the Communist Party by coaching Marina on what to say when she testified to the Warren Commission.
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The second possible interpretation of Levine’s role was that he was “on the scene primarily for the purpose of gaining intelligence.”
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This was the impression of
some of the FBI agents who questioned Levine about his relationship with Marina Oswald, including FBI counter-intelligence head William Sullivan. The conclusion assassination researcher Jerry Rose reached was that Levine was “to spread disinformation about Oswald, especially his ‘Chinese communist’ connections.”
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It did not matter whether Oswald was a committed Soviet KGB agent planning to assassinate JFK on his own, or a double agent playing out complex theatrics scripted by the CIA. In either event, Oswald perfectly fit the type of person sought out by serious assassination planners who needed a dupe to play the role they had written for the patsy. He could not have been more perfect, especially since he probably did not fully appreciate the extent to which he had been set up and abandoned, not until he saw Jack Ruby jump out at him with a gun in his hand in the basement of the Dallas Police Department.

Oswald often acted as if he expected to be misunderstood, or at least as if he were indifferent as to whether or not those in positions of authority understood him. He was vulnerable not because he wanted to be understood, but because he dreaded being seen as unimportant.

His mother seemed to share this fear.

“Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death, has done more for his country than any other living human being,” Marguerite Oswald insisted, speaking to reporters at the gravesite of her son at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 1963.

Testifying to the Warren Commission, Marguerite told them she asked her son why he came back to the United States. She knew he had a good job in Russia because he sent her expensive gifts, and he was married to a Russian girl. “He said, ‘Mother, not even Marina knows why I have returned to the United States.’ And that is all the information I ever got out of my son.”
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Until the day she died, Marguerite insisted her son, Lee Harvey Oswald, was innocent. She believed her son died in the service of his country—the United States of America—and that he laid down his life playing out his assigned counter-intelligence role as a loyal secret agent,
whatever precisely that role may have been.

But Marguerite Oswald did not understand and certainly could not explain anything Lee Harvey Oswald had done, probably since he was a child, including why he went to Russia, or why he chose to come home.

And that, it appears, is exactly the way Oswald wanted it.

“Anyone perched above the crowd with a rifle could do it.”
⁴³³

—President John F. Kennedy, in Fort Worth, Texas, the morning of November 22, 1963

“In Guatemala the political transition was unexpectedly smooth, and Castillo Armas became a popular elected president until his untimely assassination by a member of his personal bodyguard. Among the bodyguard’s possessions were documents showing he had been a constant listener to Radio Moscow’s Spanish-language broadcasts.”
⁴³⁴

—E. Howard Hunt,
Under-Cover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent
, 1974

T
HE MORNING HE DIED,
John F. Kennedy had talked about being assassinated.

Kenneth O’Donnell, the special assistant to JFK, in his testimony to the Warren Commission, described the conversation that November morning in Suite 850 of Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, before the presidential party set out for Dallas. O’Donnell was questioned by committee counsel Arlen Specter.

Mr. Specter
: When did the conversation occur?

Mr. O’Donnell
: The conversation took place in his room, with Mrs. Kennedy and myself, perhaps a half hour before he left the Hotel Texas to depart for Carswell Air Force Base.

Mr. Specter
: That was in Fort Worth?

Mr. O’Donnell
: That was in Fort Worth.

Mr. Specter
: And tell us, as nearly as you can recollect, exactly what he said at that time, please.

Mr. O’Donnell
: Well, as near as I can recollect he was commenting to his wife on the function of the Secret Service, and his interpretation of their role once the trip had commenced, in that their main function was to protect him from crowds, and to see that an unruly or sometimes an overexcited crowd did not generate into a riot, at which the President of the United States could be injured. But he said that if anybody really wanted to shoot the President of the United States, it was not a very difficult job—all one had to do was get a high building some day with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt on the President’s life.
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JFK had discussed being shot by a high-powered rifle from a tall building so frequently he appeared to have been obsessed with that assassination method. The reason he was obsessed with being assassinated by a sniper was because he had been warned that is precisely how he would be killed.

Jim Bishop, the author of
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
, recounts that the last time he saw JFK was on October 24, 1963, approximately one month before the assassination. JFK visited with Bishop and his wife in the Oval Office. Bishop was researching an article for
Good Housekeeping
magazine to be called “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy.” Bishop recalled JFK selected assassination as the subject for their last chat, commenting how much he had enjoyed reading Bishop’s earlier book,
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
. “My feelings about assassination are identical with
Mr. Lincoln’s,” JFK explained. “Anyone who wants to exchange his life for mine can take it.” Bishop commented that JFK said this with bland good humor. “They just can’t protect that much,” JFK mused.
⁴³⁶
The comment suggested JFK was resigned to his fate, anticipating it meant not living out his term in office.

Every modern-day president is aware, at least intellectually, that the possibility of assassination is very real. Yet, with JFK there was a difference. The roots of his premonition were not psychic in nature; he was aware of the threat because he had been warned a plot to assassinate him was in the works. Before Dallas, JFK had been given ample warnings of specific and credible threats to his life. On the morning of November 22, 1963, the rain had stopped, probably a reason for the assassination to take place. The bubbletop would have been placed on the car if the rain had continued, and although it wasn’t bulletproof, it might have caused refractions in the bullets’ trajectories, which could have been sufficient to call off the mission. When JFK visited Ireland in June, five months before he was assassinated, the Irish police took extra security precautions after receiving three death threats, including a warning a sniper with a rifle would take up a position on a rooftop overlooking the president’s motorcade route from the Dublin airport to the president’s family residence.
⁴³⁷
Yet, November 1963 was different. There had been multiple recurring credible threats of assassination surfacing that indicated specific plans were in the works to assassinate JFK soon. Even more seriously worrisome, the plans all had a common element—a sniper with a high-powered rifle equipped with a scope, shooting from a tall building.

Digging deeper, we find the assassination plan had been tried before, crafted by public relations guru Edward Bernays and implemented by CIA operative E. Howard—all with the blessing of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As we shall see in this chapter, disturbing parallels between the CIA-engineered assassination of Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatamala on July 26, 1957, and the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963, suggest what the CIA had learned in Central America might have been duplicated in Dallas. If the JFK assassination was a rerun of Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, professional politicians, such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, could look the other way and deny complicity.

On November 9, 1963, union organizer William Somersett, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who had become a paid informant for the intelligence division of the Miami Police Department in 1962, allowed the Miami police to record surreptitiously a telephone conversation Somersett had with his old friend, the right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer. In the conversation, Milteer bragged that he had knowledge a plot was underway to assassinate JFK. “Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?” Somersett asked. “From an office with a high-powered rifle,” Milteer bragged in response. Milteer insisted the plan was “in the works” and that a patsy would be blamed for the crime. “They won’t leave any stone unturned there, no way,” Milteer asserted. “They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen, just to throw the public off.” Somersett replied that somebody would have to go to jail if JFK got killed. Milteer responded by saying it would be just like Bruno Hauptman in the Lindberg kidnapping case, implying Hauptman had taken the punishment for a crime he did not commit.
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Miami police turned the transcript of the conversation over to the Secret Service on November 12, 1963, and the Secret Service, in turn, furnished the information to the agents planning JFK’s trip to Tampa and Miami on November 18, 1963. Former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, convinced Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, reported that Miami-based Secret Service Special Agent Robert Jamison took the threat seriously enough to have Somersett call Milteer on November 18 to verify that Milteer was in Valdosta, Georgia, that day and not in Miami, Florida.
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When Somersett confirmed that no violence-prone associates of Milteer were in Miami that day, the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service closed the case. And they failed to notify the Washington, D.C., Secret Service detail in charge of the upcoming Dallas trip or the Secret Service in Dallas about Milteer’s remarks. While Bugliosi chooses to interpret Milteer’s recorded comments as nothing more than idle speculation in response to Somersett’s leading questions, the conversation is one more indication that a wide conspiracy was in the works.

Secret Service Special Agent Forrest V. Sorrels, who was in charge of the Dallas District, described to the Warren Commission the advance
work done to plan the JFK motorcade on November 22. In response to a question whether the buildings along the motorcade route presented any particular problems, Sorrels gave an extensive answer:

All buildings are a problem, as far as we are concerned. That insofar as I have been concerned—and I am sure that every member of the Service, especially the Detail—that is always of concern to us. We always consider it a hazard. During the time that we were making this survey with the police, I made the remark that if someone wanted to get the President of the United States, he could do it with a high-powered rifle and a telescopic sight from some building or some hillside, because that has always been a concern to us, about the buildings.
⁴⁴⁰

In an era of open-car motorcades and tall office buildings where the windows opened, the risk of assassination from a high-powered rifle with a scope was great. For a popular president in the JFK-era, the danger was unavoidable since riding in a motorcade in a closed limousine or under the cover of a bubble top would have conveyed a level of cowardice that itself would have been fatal to JFK’s political future.

What remains intriguing about Milteer is that his information dovetails with what we now know about the plot to assassinate JFK in Tampa. Milteer told Somersett that JFK could have been killed in Miami, “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.”
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The motorcades in both Tampa and Miami were not canceled, but security was increased in both cities.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded the Secret Service “failed to follow up” on Somersett’s information about Milteer’s threat, concluding a telephone call to Milteer to find out where he was on November 18 was not a sufficient precaution.
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Similarly, the House Select Committee charged that the Secret Service failed to make appropriate use of the information supplied to it by the Chicago Police Department regarding the threat to assassinate JFK during his trip to Chicago.
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The House Select Committee’s conclusion was clear: “The fact was, however, that two threats to assassinate President Kennedy with high-powered rifles, both of which occurred in early November 1963, were not relayed to the Dallas region.”
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The Committee concluded that
the Secret Service’s failure to communicate the previous threats prevented Dallas officials from taking adequate precautions: