Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (32 page)

During the Secret Service check of the Dallas motorcade route, Special Agent-in-Charge Sorrels commented that if someone wanted to assassinate the President, it could be done with a rifle from a high building. President Kennedy himself had remarked he could be shot from a high building and little could be done to stop it. But such comments were just speculation. Unless the Secret Service had a specific reason to suspect the occupants or activities of a certain building, it would not inspect it. The committee found that at the time of the Dallas trip, there was not sufficient concern about the possibility of an attack from a high building to cause the agents responsible for the trip planning to develop security precautions to minimize the risk.
⁴⁴⁵

Had the Secret Service office in Dallas been made aware of the threats in Chicago and Tampa earlier in the month, they likely would have taken extra precautions. A building survey conducted under a high “level of risk” criterion might well have included the Texas School Book Depository. Both the Secret Service and the Dallas police were unusually lax about allowing windows in tall buildings along the motorcade route to remain open.

The testimony of Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels to the Warren Commission was important on these points. Sorrels rode in the lead car along with Dallas Police Chief Jessie Curry, immediately in front of JFK’s limousine. Sorrels testified that his function in the lead car was “to observe the people and buildings as we drove along in the motorcade.”
⁴⁴⁶
As the motorcade turned onto Houston Street, Sorrels observed the Texas School Book Depository. He continued watching the building as the motorcade turned left onto Elm Street. Sorrels testified that he saw two African-Americans watching the motorcade from a window a couple of floors from the top of the book depository, but he did not recall seeing any activity in the windows of the building that caused him particular concern. “I did not see any activity—no one moving around or anything like that,” he testified, repeating the statement several times.
⁴⁴⁷
This statement confirms two key points: (1) Dallas police and the Secret Service took no special precautions to secure the Texas School Book Depository; and (2) any trained sniper positioned on the sixth floor of the building
was sufficiently professional to avoid detection before the shooting started. And as noted earlier, there is nothing in the record to suggest Lee Harvey Oswald ever received specific training to be a sniper.

In November 1963, FBI agent Don Adams was assigned to investigate Joseph Milteer’s threats against JFK. In his 2012 book,
From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle: A Report to the Public from an FBI Agent Involved in the Official JFK Assassination Investigation
, Adams disputes the official Secret Service account that places Milteer in Georgia on November 22, 1963. “I spent five days, from November 22 to November 27, trying to locate Milteer and had no idea that there were lies being told about Milteer’s whereabouts, effectively taking any pressure off any search or large-scale investigation into Milteer as a suspect,” Adams wrote. “I can state with certainty that Milteer was not in Georgia on November 22; I was actively looking for him and he was nowhere to be found until five days later.”
⁴⁴⁸

Additionally, Adams recounted that at 10:30 a.m., on the morning of November 22, 1963, Milteer placed a telephone call to informant William Somersett in Miami. He reportedly told Somersett that he was in Dallas that day, commenting, “I don’t think you’ll ever see your boy again in Miami,” referring to JFK.
⁴⁴⁹
Associated Press photographer James Altgens and amateur moviemaker Mark Bell took photographs in Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination. Their images of the JFK limousine proceeding down Houston Street show a man in the crowd who looks very much like Milteer. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after an extensive photographic examination conducted by experts, concluded the man in the photo was “substantially taller,” by more than six inches, than Milteer, who was estimated to be five feet four inches tall.
⁴⁵⁰
Adams disagreed: “I met, detained and stood toe-to-toe with Milteer. Granted, he was shorter than I was [6’7”]. However, I know he was taller than 5’4”; in fact, in my description of Milteer, I wrote that he was 5’8” tall.”
⁴⁵¹

In a footnote, the House Select Committee noted that no evidence could be found that Milteer was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.
⁴⁵²
Again, Adams disagrees. Adams first saw the photograph of Milteer in the
Dallas crowd in 1993, when he picked up a copy of Robert Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone’s 1989 book,
High Treason
.
⁴⁵³
“I was flabbergasted,” Adams wrote, describing his reaction the first time he saw the photograph. “I couldn’t believe it. Here was someone who had threatened to kill the President of the United States, standing alongside the motorcade route that fateful day in Dallas. What was going on? I had been sent to find Milteer in Georgia the afternoon of the assassination, but didn’t locate him until Wednesday the 27th. Was Milteer in Dallas? I’d say yes!”
⁴⁵⁴

What Don Adams was suggesting is the strong likelihood the perpetrators of the JFK assassination were in Dallas that day, ready to watch. Milteer was not the only one.

In the 1950s, the United Fruit Company, then the world’s largest importers of bananas to the United States, had some powerful friends in Washington, D.C. Allen Dulles, appointed by President Eisenhower to head the CIA in 1953, had ties with the United Fruit Company dating back to 1933 when the United Fruit Company hired Sullivan & Cromwell, the prestigious Wall Street firm in New York where Dulles was a lawyer at the time. After being retained as legal counsel, Dulles bought a large block of United Fruit stock.
⁴⁵⁵
On retainer for the United Fruit Company was Thomas G. Corcoran, the prominent New Deal attorney known as “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran. He was Harvard trained, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a confidante of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since the 1940s, the company had also retained Edward L. Bernays, the genius consultant credited for inventing public relations as a profession, whose 1928 book,
Propaganda,
was openly admired by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
⁴⁵⁶

The problem began in March 1951 when Jacobo Arbenz, a professional army officer who was the son of a Swiss pharmacist who migrated to Guatemala, took over the leadership of that country after a successful military coup. CIA operative E. Howard Hunt described Arbenz as “a man of modest intellect” who “had married the daughter of a prominent San Salvador family, and she, a doctrinaire Communist, had guided his career from army ranks to the presidency of Guatemala.”
⁴⁵⁷
Arbenz’s great
sin was to initiate land reform, expropriating 225,000 acres of property from the United Fruit Company, then Guatemala’s largest employer. The company’s workers formed a union and demanded $2.50 a day for each worker, up from $1.36, cutting into the firm’s profits. As was typical in Central America at that time, some 3 percent of the landholders held some 70 percent of the land in Guatemala. By 1954, the CIA in Washington became concerned Communists in Guatemala were organizing behind Arbenz, a concern that intensified when intelligence reports suggested the U.S.S.R. had begun covertly supplying the Arbenz regime with arms. Arbenz permitted the existence of a small Communist party in Guatemala, though he had no avid Communists at any top positions in his government. Ultimately, Arbenz nationalized over 1.5 million acres, including some of his family land, to turn over to the nation’s peasants. Much of that land belonged to the United Fruit Company.

Finally, President Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon ordered the National Security Council to overthrow the Arbenz regime in Guatemala. The CIA offered the assignment to E. Howard Hunt. “I was told that this was currently the most important clandestine project in the world,” Hunt wrote “And that if I accepted the position, I would be the head of the project’s propaganda and political action staff.” After Hunt accepted the assignment, President Eisenhower called a meeting in the Oval Office to introduce Hunt to Edward Bernays, the public relations consultant retained by United Fruit to promote the company.

To advance the interests of United Fruit in the United States, Bernays had already recruited a group of well-known journalists and editors from prominent US publications to spend two weeks in Guatemala, in January 1952, as guests of the company so “they could report to the American people what they saw.”
⁴⁵⁸
Bernays was jubilant when stories began appearing in Scripps-Howard newspapers reporting of efforts in Guatemala “to engender hatred of Yankee monopoly capitalism and imperialism.”
⁴⁵⁹
Between early 1952 and the spring of 1954, Bernays had organized at least five two-week “fact-finding” junkets to Guatemala, with as many as ten news reporters on each trip. The trips took months to plan and were carefully timed and executed. The United Fruit Company spared no expense, claimed Thomas McCann, the former company official who worked with Bernays to organize the trips. Speaking candidly, McCann
concluded the trips represented “a serious attempt to compromise objectivity” of the press.
⁴⁶⁰

In discussing his plans for Guatemala, Hunt was particularly open that he was authorized to use covert methods to combat the spread of Communist influence in the Western Hemisphere. Hunt acknowledged that the United Fruit Company was known by locals as “El Pulpo,” or “The Octopus,” because the company “owned hundreds of miles of Guatemalan territory, while its tentacles bought up controlling interests in the railroad, electric power, communications, passenger and freight lines, and the administration of the nation’s only port.” Hunt openly stated that the company, the largest employer in Guatemala with some forty thousand employees, had gained its power “through the support of the corrupt former president, Jorge Ubico, who had given United Fruit most of the land, allowing them to pay almost no taxes on it.”
⁴⁶¹

To provide the Eisenhower administration the required “plausible deniability,” Hunt determined that within the CIA the Guatemalan operation would be conducted on a need-to-know basis. A cover program was set up under the code name PB/Success. Hunt’s unit had its own funds, communications center, and chain of command within the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Hunt was issued forged documentation from the CIA’s Central Cover Division, and he set up field headquarters in a two-story barracks at a former US Navy training camp at the Opa-Loca Airport in a suburb of Miami. “PB/Success did have a precedent that we planned to duplicate,” Hunt wrote, describing the mission. “In August 1953, Operation Ajex had successfully deposed the Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadeqa in a bloodless coup after carefully preparing the minds of the target government and the population for such an event.”
⁴⁶²
Hunt’s job was to pull off the tactical, covert military part of the coup d’état the Eisenhower administration was planning to accomplish in Guatemala; Bernays was to handle the mind orientation. After all, the core idea of public relations as defined by Bernays rested with the techniques needed to help make up the public’s mind—or, in today’s terminology, to set and control the event’s “narrative.”

In Honduras, Hunt and the CIA trained a small band of mercenaries under Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan military officer who had escaped from prison after an unsuccessful coup against Arbenz in November 1950, as Arbenz was assuming power. On June 17, 1954, Armas and his band of mercenaries crossed the Honduran border into Guatemala. For several days, Hunt and the CIA organized American jets and American pilots to strafe and bombard Guatemala City, the capital of Guatemala. The point of air attack was psychological. Hunt, in a videotaped recollection of the Guatemalan operation said, “Propaganda takes the place of armed combat—blood-letting—you just don’t have to do it.” The CIA-financed “rebel army” mercenaries numbered fewer than two hundred armed men, a “shadow army” at best. Yet, the CIA propaganda campaign was designed to make the Guatemalan people and government believe supporting Arbenz was hopeless. A CIA-funded and operated clandestine radio program recorded by the CIA in Miami and broadcast in neighboring countries pretended to be the “Voice of Liberation,” broadcasting from within Guatemala, spreading false reports about legions of rebel soldiers who never existed defeating government troops in fierce battles that never happened.
⁴⁶³

The truth is that Carlos Castillo Armas did not lead a popular uprising against a Communist regime, he lead a mercenary army financed and trained by the CIA in a CIA-engineered coup d’état. Behind the scenes were John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under President Eisenhower, and his brother Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA. The propaganda campaign designed by Hunt and Bernays was designed to make Arbenz and his government appear to be an “instrument of Moscow” and “a pawn in the Communist propaganda campaign” and a “spearhead of the Soviet Union,” as the Arbenz government complained to the United Nations. In an emergency session of the Security Council held at the request of Guatemala, only the Soviet Union supported Guatemala. Henry Cabot Lodge, the US ambassador to the United Nations, in a very publicized statement warned that “the Soviet Union has got designs on the American Hemisphere.” Lodge lectured the Soviet Union’s ambassador in the Security Council to “stay out of this hemisphere and don’t try to start your plans
and your conspiracies over here.” The Lodge family, including Henry Cabot Lodge, had investments in the United Fruit Company.

On June 25, 1954, Arbenz resigned and went into exile in the Mexican embassy. On July 3, 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas returned to Guatemala City aboard a US embassy airplane. He received a hero’s welcome, all orchestrated by the CIA. One hundred thousand cheering Guatemalans gathered at the palace balcony to usher him into power. On July 8, 1954, a Guatemalan military junta elected Carlos Castillo Armas to power; in August 1954, Armas suspended all civil liberties. Within a week of taking power, the Armas government arrested four thousand people accused of participating in communist activity; within four months, some seventy-two thousand Guatemalans were registered as Communists.
⁴⁶⁴
Armas proceeded to reverse the reforms put into place by Arbenz. Land appropriated in nationalization efforts was taken away from the peasants and returned to the United Fruit Company. Former CIA director General Walter Bedell Smith, who had served in World War II as Eisenhower’s chief of staff in the Tunisia Campaign and during the invasion of Italy, became a director of the United Fruit Company. Predictably, Hunt was proud of his achievement.
⁴⁶⁵
“For the first time since the Spanish Civil War a Communist government had been overthrown—and in ‘Good Neighbor’ Central America, at that,” Hunt wrote.
⁴⁶⁶