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As he wrote in 2008,95 the information was not communicated to the Dallas’s office. Neither was it provided to the Warren Commission; he attempted to personally correct that oversight, however, before he could tell his story, he was forced back to Chicago under the pretext of his being needed for an investigation; the real purpose was to “frame” him for allegedly stolen Secret Service files. This gambit was successful for the government agents’ intent on shutting him up and keeping the secrets, but to do so required sending an innocent man to prison for seven years. His book is very persuasive that he was indeed “setup.”
M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Agent
Mr. Swearingen was an FBI agent, also in Chicago, who got caught up in the preassassination rumors of the pending presidential ambush. He had found out, from a Cuban exile informant named Ramon in 1962, that plans were being put together in different cities which JFK would probably travel to—Chicago, Miami, and Dallas, possibly others—for teams to shoot at the president. “The different teams will make sure that Kennedy is killed, without it looking like a Mafia hit, that’s where the CIA comes in, and then the patsy, who takes the first shot, will be killed. It is a very simple plan. The idea is to make it look like there was just one assassin. We practiced this in Florida when Castro was the target. The problem was that we couldn’t get close to Castro because his security knows who we are. Shooting Kennedy will be much easier than shooting Castro.”96 Ramon was one of the few exiles left who liked Kennedy and had divulged this information to Swearingen because he had already scared another Cuban—purportedly a hit man working for Castro—into leaving with a threat that he would spread the word that he was an informant for the CIA and the FBI.97 Ramon passed on additional details to Swearingen, which confirmed that Bill Harvey was involved in this plan, including how he had been sacked by Hoover for not maintaining contact with his office, that he was “big, red faced, heavy set. He drinks a lot. He hates both of the Kennedys.” He also knew about Guy Bannister’s involvement with a potential patsy who was a real “nutcase” though he didn’t know his name. Swearingen had known Bannister himself, having worked for him when he was the SAC of Chicago and wasn’t surprised that he had become involved in the plot. He continued, “Knowing what Ramon had told me, I could see the assassination coming a year before it happened, but my superiors did not believe the CIA could carry out such a dastardly deed as to kill the president of the United States.”98
Swearingen said that he told his SAIC, Bill Roemer, the story he had gotten from Ramon, but he thought Ramon was a “nutcase” He then decided to tell Supervisor Joseph Culkin “and then write an office memo to the SAC under the caption ‘Chicago Mob and the CIA Plan to assassinate President Kennedy. Miscellaneous File 62-0.’” Culkin’s response was “Is that your joke for the day, Ivan?” The nickname Ivan referred to how Swearingen dressed up like a Russian to keep warm during Chicago’s cold winters. His reward for filing this report was getting a transfer to Paintsville, Kentucky, then to London, Kentucky, and later from that outpost to New York City. On the day Kennedy was assassinated, he was in a training class in Washington when Inspector W. Mark Felt (later identified as the anonymous character “Deep Throat” of Watergate infamy) ran in and yelled, “President Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas!” He volunteered to go immediately to Dallas, telling Felt that he had “reason to believe Kennedy’s shooting may involve a conspiracy between the CIA, the Mafia and some Cuban exiles. I can be there in a few hours. If you pick other agents from around the country they will have to dictate leads on their cases, go home, pack, make reservation, say good-bye to their kids, and then fly to Dallas. This whole In-service class could be in Dallas before dinner this evening. Felt responded, ‘That’s okay. We’ll handle it. You go home and take care of the work you’ve neglected for the past two weeks.’ The Inspector turned on this right heel and walked away.”99
Rose Cheramie
Rose Cheramie was found unconscious by the side of the road at Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963. Lieutenant Francis Frudge of the Louisiana State Police took her to the state hospital. On the way to the hospital, Cheramie said that she had been thrown out of a car by two gangsters, either Cuban or Italian, who she believed worked for Jack Ruby as they drove from Florida to Dallas. She claimed that the men were involved in a plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Cheramie added that Kennedy would be killed in Dallas within a few days. She told the same story to doctors and nurses who treated her at the hospital. As she appeared to be under the influence of drugs, her story was ignored.100
Following the assassination, Cheramie was interviewed by the police. She claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited Ruby’s nightclub. In fact, she believed the two men were having a homosexual relationship. The word spread around the hospital that she had predicted Kennedy’s murder in advance. Dr. Wayne Owen, who had been interning from LSU at the time, later told the Madison Capital Times that he and other interns were told of the plot in advance of the assassination. Moreover, Cheramie even predicted the role of her former boss Jack Ruby when she told one of the interns “that one of the men involved in the plot was a man named Jack Rubinstein,” Ruby’s former name, which some people still called him.101
Richard Case Nagell
The plain, unvarnished, and undeniable truth regarding Richard Case Nagell is that he shot up a bank in El Paso so that he would be arrested and be in jail on the day that the JFK assassination occurred so that he couldn’t be accused of being a part of the conspiracy. The only thing he got wrong about that was the date of the assassination, which he thought would come in September or October. He did this in order to avoid being connected with the crime, figuring that a couple of years in jail beat being locked away for the rest of his life. The facts are widely available even though the FBI tried repeatedly to obfuscate and bury his testimony and destroy his credibility by questioning his mental capacity to testify. Dick Russell, in his book The Man Who Knew Too Much, tells the story of Nagell, a man who, two months before Kennedy’s assassination, walked into the bank, pulled out a Colt .45 caliber pistol, fired two shots into the ceiling, and then calmly walked back outside and sat on the curb waiting to be arrested. When later questioned by the FBI, he would only say that “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”102
Nagell had been an army counterintelligence officer in the late 1950s who had been advised that “in the event I was apprehended, killed or compromised during the performance of my illegal Field Operations Intelligence (FOI) duties, the Department of the Army would publicly disclaim any knowledge of or connection with such duties, exercising its right of plausible denial.”103
While he was stationed in Japan in the late 1950s, Nagell worked side by side with Lee Harvey Oswald, both of whom were being trained in counterintelligence under an operation having the code name “Hidell,” which Oswald would later use as part of his alias, “Alek James Hidell.”104 Continuing his role as a double agent, Nagell began working with Soviet intelligence in Mexico City, reporting back to the CIA and working under Desmond FitzGerald; he was assigned the task of monitoring Oswald after he had returned from Russia. He became aware of the fact that Oswald was involved with two Cuban exiles in what he saw was a “large operation to kill JFK.” The Cubans were known by their covert names, “Angel and Leopoldo,” and were working closely with the notorious CIA-financed group of exiles known as “Alpha 66,” which was also directed by CIA Agent David Atlee Phillips.105
Author Russell described his interviews with an ex-CIA operative named Colonel Bill Bishop who agreed to tell him certain information regarding the assassination “up to the point where it does not create personal jeopardy, legally or otherwise.” Colonel Bishop admitted that “we had a coup d’état on November 22, 1963.” He stated that he had met Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Case Nagell, and Rolando Masferrer in the exile training camp near Lake Pontchartrain. He claimed that Oswald was in the camp, trying to get involved with the Cuban exiles, having been sent there by Clay
Shaw (a.k.a Bertrand). Bishop didn’t think much of Oswald’s performance as a sharpshooter, saying, “There’s no way in hell he could have fired three shots in that space of time, with that accuracy, with that weapon.”106 He said that Nagell was associated with the notorious Alpha 66 group and their “Operation 40,” the ultrasecret CIA “hit squad” set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. This group was described as the “elite troops of the old guard within the exile movement,” who made an effective alliance with CIA right-wingers against CIA liberals and made up of assassins-for-hire, Mob henchmen, and informers. One of the missions which Phillips had sent Alpha 66 was to attack Russian ships in Cuban ports in an attempt to draw JFK into a war with Cuba.107
According to Colonel Bishop, as reported in Russell’s book, Nagell was involved as a CIA contract agent in intelligence and was working with the anti-Castro exiles, trying to find out about things “he had no business knowing.”108 Colonel Bishop said that he called Bill Colby, whom he knew from training at Fort Benning, to find out more about Nagell. Colby didn’t know Nagell, so Bishop had assigned one of the Cubans to follow him several months before Nagell showed up in the El Paso bank. By that time, Bishop was no longer involved in the operation, but he found out that there was still a Cuban following Nagell when he went to El Paso, though he didn’t know if it was the same Cuban he had assigned earlier to do that. In the process of acquiring too much knowledge—information well beyond his “need to know”—Nagell violated the basic precept of his trade and decided he had to take the action he did to avoid becoming caught up in the assassination.
In his doubled counterespionage role, the Soviets ordered Nagell to convince Oswald that he was being set up by Angel and Leopoldo as the “patsy” of the assassination. According to Russell, the KGB had learned of the plot and wanted to avoid becoming scapegoats themselves; their strategy was to destroy the plan by eliminating the designated “patsy.” Nagell met with Oswald in New Orleans and gave him the warning; however, Oswald was not responsive. Rather than carry out the order to kill Oswald if he wouldn’t quit his role in the assassination, he decided to send a registered letter to J. Edgar Hoover explaining the plot to kill the president. His letter, dated September 17, 1963, detailed his knowledge of the plan, which he thought might occur as early as the following week, in Washington DC, but it was unclear, and he used the word “probably” to indicate that the date and setting were not finalized. About the same time, Oswald was considering a move to the Baltimore-Washington area and had written to the Communist Party and to the Socialist Workers Party in New York inquiring how he might get in contact with their representatives. These letters would also provide a record of his attempt to establish his communist bona fides for any future investigators to ponder.
Bishop stated that he was involved in obtaining funding from the “‘Syndicate out of New Orleans, for Alpha 66. At that point in time, Rolando Masferrer was the key bagman, for lack of a better term, for Alpha 66. Primarily the funding came through the Syndicate, because of Masferrer’s connections with those people back in Cuba. He had ties with Santos Trafficante, Jr., and other criminal elements … He also had different ties with Jimmy Hoffa.”109 Russell quotes Colonel Bishop as saying, “Hoffa gave Masferrer $50,000 expense money to partially set up the assassination team. I didn’t realize until later that’s what the money was for. I didn’t see the money, but I heard that from reliable sources … It was later, not too long before the assassination, that Masferrer made the statement—more than once, not only to me but to others—that Kennedy was gonna be hit. But hell, I had heard that before, from any number of people, I didn’t pay no mind to it. I mean, it wasn’t unusual for Jimmy Hoffa or Trafficante to come up with X number of dollars to support the exiles’ operation, okay?”110
On October 31, 1995, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) sent a registered letter notifying Nagell that he was to be interviewed to obtain his sworn testimony. One day after the letter was mailed, Nagell was found dead in his apartment, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Until then, he had no history of heart problems and claimed to be in good health. Russell discussed this with the Los Angeles coroner Gary Kellerman to find out if a heart attack could be induced. Kellerman’s reply is pertinent to not only Nagell’s death but a number of other similar deaths of key witnesses as well. “I’m not sure what chemical you have to use, but I’ve heard of it. From what I understand, it’s a chemical that gets into the system and then it’s gone. You can’t find it.”111
Dick Russell had gotten to know Nagell better than anyone and knew from his conversations with him that if “an official government body ever took him seriously,” as was now finally the case, “he would probably cooperate”112 (emphasis in original).
James Wilcott
Fifteen years after the assassination, James Wilcott, a former CIA finance officer, testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations that he had handled the funding for a CIA project in which Oswald had been recruited as a CIA spy.113 In his testimony to the HSCA, Wilcott said Oswald served the CIA specifically as a double agent in the Soviet Union who afterward came under suspicion by the Agency. He was uniquely qualified to testify openly and honestly about Oswald because he and his wife Elsie had resigned from the Agency in 1966 directly as a result of their horror of how the Agency was implicated in the JFK assassination. “Because we became convinced that what CIA was doing couldn’t be reconciled to basic principles of democracy or basic principles of humanism.”114
Wilcott worked in the finance branch of the Tokyo CIA Station at the time of the assassination and knew several agents who had found out the truth of what happened: the CIA was involved in the assassination. He didn’t believe them at first until one of them told him the cryptonym under which Oswald had drawn funds when he returned from Russia to the United States. “It was a cryptonym that I was familiar with. It must have been at least two or there times that I had remembered it, and it did ring a bell … It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”115
Trouble in Miami
John F. Kennedy had gone to Miami a few weeks before his trip to Dallas; shortly before the trip to Miami, a police informant had uncovered the existence of a plot to kill him either there or in some other unspecified city. The plan was to shoot him “from an office window with a high-powered rifle.”116 The Miami Police turned this information over to the FBI and the Secret Service, yet this information was never given to the Secret Service agents who were responsible for the Dallas trip. On his trip to Miami, the plan for a motorcade was scrapped, and he was whisked into and out of town by helicopter from the airport. The informant had taped Joseph A. Milteer as he made this prediction; he concluded by saying that “[an investigation] wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there … They will pick up somebody within hours afterward … just to throw the public off.”117
Normally, this kind of threat would not have simply been discarded as soon as the first presidential trip after that had been finished, at least not until it was fully investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. Until the plot had been dealt with completely, it would have been treated only as the beginning, and from then on the FBI and the Secret Service would have been on maximum alert. Of all the powerful men positioned throughout these organizations, from the White House down to the FBI’s local offices, who would have pulled them off the job? Why would that have been done?
Gunmen Spotted in Dealey Plaza, November 20, 1963
During a routine patrol in Dealey Plaza on Wednesday morning, two police officers noticed several men standing behind the wooden fence on the grassy knoll, engaged in a mock target practice, aiming their rifles over the fence in the direction of the plaza. The police ran toward the fence, but the men on the knoll saw them coming and quickly departed in a car which had been parked nearby. The officers did not think too much of the incident until after the assassination two days later, when they reported it to the
FBI. Though it was acknowledged in a cursory report, the incident was not reported in their major investigation reports used by the Warren Commission. The original report remained buried for fifteen years until it was released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.118 Evidently, someone decided that this particular police report was detrimental to the overall mission, which was meant to prove exactly the opposite of what this report suggested was going on in Dealey Plaza in the days just before the assassination.
Notes
* This is consistent with a number of theories by researchers (for example, see Twyman, p. 760) that the entire phase 1 of the plot was designed such that most participants believed they would be participating in a fake assassination attempt for training purposes by the Secret Service; in most cases the standard covert operations devices—e.g., “need to know,” “plausible denial,” etc., in phase 1; “secrecy oaths” in phase 2 would be sufficient to ensure silence. Where it didn’t, other, more final, methods were available.
* Curry’s vanity would prove to be helpful in phase 2, when he showed up in practically every one of the Stoughton photographs on Air Force One after the assassination, even as the “investigation” commenced back at headquarters.