JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (70 page)

But again, as in the Bay of Pigs, he blamed the CIA for manipulation, and in this case, assassination. In his anger at the CIA’s behind-the-scenes role in the deaths of Diem and Nhu, he said to his friend Senator George Smathers, “I’ve got to do something about those bastards.” He told Smathers that “they should be stripped of their exorbitant power.”
[211]
He was echoing his statement after the Bay of Pigs that he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
[212]

Kennedy’s anguish at Diem’s death was foreshadowed by his response to the CIA-supported murder of another nationalist leader.

On January 17, 1961, three days before John Kennedy took office as president, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the Belgian government with the complicity of the CIA.
[213]
As Madeleine Kalb, author of
The Congo Cables
, has observed, “much of the sense of urgency in the first few weeks of January [1961] which led to the death of Lumumba came . . . from fear of the impending change in Washington” that would come with Kennedy’s inauguration.
[214]
It was no accident that Lumumba was rushed to his execution three days before the U.S. presidency was turned over to a man whose most notorious foreign policy speech in the Senate had been a call for Algerian independence. Senator John Kennedy’s July 1957 speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement created an international uproar, with more conservative critics (including even Adlai Stevenson) claiming he had gone too far in his support of African nationalism.
[215]

In 1959, the year before Kennedy was elected president, he had said to the Senate: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution . . . The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.”
[216]
In Africa and Europe, Kennedy had become well known as a supporter of African nationalism. JFK even took his support of the African independence movement into his 1960 presidential campaign, saying then repeatedly, “we have lost ground in Africa because we have neglected and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African people.”
[217]
It is noteworthy that in the index to his 1960 campaign speeches, there are 479 references to Africa.
[218]

The CIA took seriously Kennedy’s African nationalist sympathies. As his inauguration approached, the CIA’s station chief in Leopoldville, Lawrence Devlin, spoke of “the need to take ‘drastic steps’ before it was too late.”
[219]
CIA analyst Paul Sakwa pointed out in an interview that the decision to put Lumumba in the hands of his assassins was made by men “in the pay of and receiving constant counsel from the CIA station.”
[220]
The CIA succeeded in having Lumumba killed in haste by Belgian collaborators three days before Kennedy took his oath of office.

Four weeks later, on February 13, 1961, JFK received a phone call with the delayed news of Lumumba’s murder. Photographer Jacques Lowe took a remarkable picture of the president at that moment. Lowe’s photo of Kennedy responding to the news of Lumumba’s assassination is on the dust-jacket cover of Richard D. Mahoney’s book
JFK: Ordeal in Africa
. It shows JFK horror-stricken. His eyes are shut. The fingers of his right hand are pressing into his forehead. His head is collapsing against the phone held to his ear.

Kennedy was not even president at the time of Lumumba’s death. However, he recognized that if as president-elect he had spoken out publicly in support of Lumumba’s life, he might have stopped his assassination. After Kennedy had won the November 1960 election, Lumumba under house arrest had smuggled out a telegram congratulating Kennedy and expressing his admiration for the president-elect’s support for African independence.
[221]
JFK had then asked Averell Harriman, “Should we help Lumumba?” Harriman replied that he “was not sure we could help him even if we wanted to.”
[222]

In spite of his sympathy for Lumumba, Kennedy had not spoken out on the Congo leader’s behalf in the weeks leading up to his assassination and Kennedy’s inauguration. When JFK received the delayed news of Lumumba’s murder a month later, he was anguished by his failure at not having helped him.

His response to the news of Diem’s murder was even more pronounced. In the case of Diem, he held himself especially responsible because of his cooperation, albeit reluctant, with the coup. Had he thrown presidential caution to the winds and spoken up decisively, he might have saved Diem’s life. A badly compromised Vietnamese leader, with whom he might once have negotiated a withdrawal from the war, was now dead. All of this entered into his disgust with the Vietnam War and the strength of his decision to withdraw from it.

At the last possible moment, at 10:15 a.m. on Saturday, November 2, White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced that President Kennedy’s trip to Chicago had been cancelled. The decision to call off his trip was made so late that the press plane had already taken off for Chicago. Salinger said to the media left behind: “The President is not going to the football game.” Salinger said the Vietnam crisis would keep Kennedy in Washington.
[223]

Chicago Secret Service agents knew that another reason for the last-second cancellation was the warning they had given the White House: Two snipers with high-powered rifles were thought to be waiting along the president’s parade route. Three other potential assassins were already in custody or about to be arrested: the two suspected snipers being held at the Secret Service office, and Thomas Arthur Vallee, who was being followed by the Chicago Police.

The time at which Thomas Arthur Vallee was arrested, 9:10 a.m. Central Time (10:10 a.m. Eastern Time),
[224]
by Chicago Police intelligence officers Daniel Groth and Peter Schurla, is significant. Whereas the press announcement of the Chicago trip’s cancellation was made at 10:15 a.m. Eastern (9:15 a.m. Central), even a quick decision to cancel the trip would have been made at least ten minutes before the public announcement—with government authorities therefore being aware of the trip’s cancellation by about 10:00 a.m. Eastern (9:00 a.m. Central).

Why did the police officers who had been watching for hours overnight a potential presidential assassin wait until
after
the president had cancelled his trip before they arrested their suspect? The impression given is that the purpose of the two intelligence-connected officers may not have been to restrain Vallee but to shadow him until the president was actually shot. For the success of the assassination plot, the scapegoat Vallee had to remain free—and did remain free—so long as Kennedy was still coming to Chicago and could be shot there. If the officers’ purpose was, as claimed, “to get Vallee off the street” and protect the president, why was Vallee’s arrest put off until
after
government authorities knew President Kennedy was no longer coming to Chicago?

On the following Monday and Tuesday, Maurice Martineau collected the Chicago plot information from his Secret Service agents. Unlike in their work on other investigations, they were told to prepare no documents of their own. Following Martineau’s orders, the Chicago agents dictated oral reports to the office’s top secretary, Charlotte Klapkowski, then turned in their notebooks. Secret Service chief James J. Rowley had phoned Martineau from Washington, asking that the Chicago office use a special “COS” (Central Office Secret) file number for this case—a process whose effect, as Bolden explained later to House investigators, was to sequester the Chicago plot documents, making their subterranean existence deniable by the government.
[225]
In the Chicago office, only Martineau wrote and saw the official, top-secret report. He sent it immediately by special courier to Washington chief James J. Rowley.
[226]

Abraham Bolden watched apprehensively the compartmentalized preparation of the super-secret Chicago report. Looking back after Dallas, he would wonder what became of this critical information that could have saved the president’s life. In the meantime, he felt, as an already known objector to Kennedy’s flawed Secret Service protection, that he had come under added suspicion for the forbidden knowledge he now had of the Chicago plot.

On November 17, Bolden was suddenly ordered to report to Washington, D.C. There the Internal Revenue Service offered him an undercover assignment for an investigation of congressional aides. He would, they said, be given a new identity, that of “David Baker.” He was to turn in all his Secret Service identification. He was told that his old identity of Abraham Bolden would be erased, even to the point of the IRS destroying his birth records.

Bolden wondered why he had been singled out for such a special assignment. The IRS had its own black agents. Was he so brilliant that they had to recruit him from the Secret Service? He thought there was something suspicious about it all. He declined the offer.
[227]

As I visited with Abraham Bolden one sunny morning in 2001 in his backyard in South Side Chicago, he straightened up from his gardening and said quietly that he thought he had been set up in mid-November 1963 to be killed.
[228]
As was the case for thousands of Latin American activists when they were about to be abducted and murdered, he was being positioned for his disappearance. Abe Bolden knew far too much in the days after the failed Chicago plot to kill Kennedy. Although Bolden managed to escape a Washington setup on November 17, when he returned to Chicago he was filled with apprehension. He felt something terrible was about to happen. He told both his wife and a secretary at the Secret Service office that he thought the president was going to be assassinated.
[229]

On the following Friday afternoon, November 22, he went to a tavern in Chicago to interview a man about a forged check. A television set suddenly flashed the news that Kennedy had been shot. Bolden’s legs seemed to collapse. It had happened, just as he feared.
[230]

When Bolden returned to his office, he raised the question with his fellow Secret Service agents about the obvious connections between the Chicago plot and the president’s murder that afternoon in Dallas only three weeks later. Most of the agents agreed that they were connected.
[231]
However, Special Agent In Charge Martineau was quick to shut down any office discussion linking Chicago on November 2 and Dallas on November 22. He told his staff what to believe: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. There was no connection with Chicago. Forget November 2 in Chicago.
[232]

In January 1964, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of ordering all its agents to turn in their identification booklets for replacements. Secret Service agents carried small, passport-size booklets holding their identification, known as “commission books.” When the order came down requiring each agent to be re-photographed and provided with a newly engraved commission book, Bolden suspected that Secret Service credentials had been used as a cover device in the assassination of President Kennedy.
[233]
As we shall see, his suspicions would be confirmed.

Bolden continued to reflect on the president’s poor security that he had witnessed on the White House detail. He also thought about the connections between Chicago and Dallas, wondering if that information shouldn’t be shared with the Warren Commission. He bided his time, waiting for a chance to speak up on forbidden subjects. An opportunity presented itself the following spring.

On May 17, 1964, Bolden arrived in Washington, D.C., for a month-long training program at the Secret Service School. He took advantage of his first afternoon in Washington to try to contact the Warren Commission. His Secret Service superiors had anticipated his initiative. As Bolden became aware, his movements in Washington were being monitored. An accompanying Chicago agent was watching him closely. When he tried unsuccessfully on May 17 to phone Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin, he realized the Chicago agent probably overheard him.
[234]

On May 18, as Bolden was attending one of his first classes, the Secret Service ordered him to fly back to Chicago to take part, they said, in an investigation into a black counterfeiting ring. On his return to Chicago, Bolden was arrested by fellow agents. Maurice Martineau accused him of trying to sell Secret Service files to a counterfeiter. Bolden told him the accusation was ridiculous. He was taken before a district judge and charged with the crimes of soliciting money to commit fraud, obstructing justice, and conspiracy.
[235]

In a trial on these charges held before District Judge J. S. Perry on July 11-12, 1964, the jury reached an impasse. Judge Perry said he would exercise a rare prerogative by advising the jurors how to rule on the evidence: “In my opinion, the evidence sustains a verdict of guilty on Counts 1, 2, and Count 3.”
[236]
Undeterred by the judge’s advice, the jury remained deadlocked. A mistrial was declared.
[237]