JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (86 page)

At the same time that Kennedy diplomatically resolved the Indonesian–Netherlands conflict, the president countered the CIA’s plots against Sukarno by issuing his National Security Action Memorandum 179 on August 16, 1962. Addressing NSAM 179 to the heads of the State Department, Defense Department, CIA, AID, and the U.S. Information Agency, JFK ordered them to take a positive approach to Indonesia:

“With a peaceful settlement of the West Irian dispute now in prospect, I would like to see us capitalize on the US role in promoting this settlement to move toward a new and better relationship with Indonesia. I gather that with this issue resolved the Indonesians too would like to move in this direction, and will be presenting us with numerous requests.

“To seize this opportunity, will all agencies concerned please review their programs for Indonesia and assess what further measures might be useful. I have in mind the possibility of expanded civic action, military aid, and economic stabilization and development programs, as well as diplomatic initiatives. The Department of State is requested to pull together all relevant agency proposals in a plan of action and submit it to me no later than September 15th.

John F. Kennedy”
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As in the case of newly independent African nations, the CIA’s deep-seated opposition to Kennedy’s openness to Sukarno arose from something more basic than Cold War ideology. As in the Congo, Indonesia was rich in natural resources. If its natural resources were developed, Indonesia would become the third or fourth richest nation in the world.
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U.S. corporations were determined to exploit Indonesia for their own profits, whereas Sukarno was busy protecting the wealth of his country for the people by expropriating all foreign holdings. With the corporation-friendly Dutch out of the picture thanks to Kennedy’s diplomacy, Sukarno could now block foreign control of West Irian resources as well.
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From the ruling standpoint of corporate profits and Cold War ideology, it was clear Sukarno had to go. The CIA was committed to achieving that goal, as Sukarno was well aware. On November 4, 1963, he told U.S. ambassador Howard Jones “he had been given evidence of a CIA plan to topple him and his government.”
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Jones reported to the State Department: “Sukarno acknowledged he was convinced that President Kennedy and the U.S. Ambassador were not working against him. However, he was aware from the past that CIA often participated in activities of which the Ambassador was not aware and which even perhaps the White House was not aware.”
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On the evening of November 19, 1963, when JFK said he was willing to accept Sukarno’s invitation to visit Indonesia the following spring, he was setting in motion a radically transforming process that could dramatize in a very visible way Kennedy’s support of third world nationalism. That sea change in U.S. government policy would be terminated three days later. The fate of Sukarno himself would be decided, in effect, in Dallas. As would be revealed by post-Dallas events, the primary factor that had kept Sukarno’s independent government alive amid the hostile forces trying to undermine it was the personal support of President John F. Kennedy.

The assassins of the president controlled the crime scene, Dealey Plaza, from the beginning. When witnesses instinctively stormed the grassy knoll to chase a shooter who was apparently behind the fence at the top, they immediately encountered plainclothesmen identifying themselves as Secret Service agents. These men facilitated and covered up the escape of the triggermen, if they were not themselves the triggermen shielded by Secret Service credentials.

The Warren Commission acknowledges in effect that the men behind the fence on the grassy knoll could not have been genuine Secret Service agents. The
Warren Report
states that the Secret Service agents “assigned to the motorcade remained at their posts during the race to the hospital. None stayed at the scene of the shooting, and none entered the Texas School Book Depository Building at or immediately after the shooting . . . Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Dallas office, was the first Secret Service agent to return to the scene of the assassination, approximately 20 or 25 minutes after the shots were fired.”
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The men in Dealey Plaza who said they were Secret Service agents played an important role in the assassination. However, in so doing, they themselves became part of the evidence. This was thanks to the testimony of the witnesses whom they were trying to control.

After President Kennedy was shot when his limousine passed through Dealey Plaza, Dallas Police Officer Joe Marshall Smith was one of the first people to rush up the grassy knoll and behind its stockade fence. As he reported to his superiors, he smelled gunpowder right away.
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He told the Warren Commission that when he encountered a man in the parking lot behind the fence, “I pulled my pistol from my holster, and I thought, this is silly, I don’t know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.”
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The “Secret Service agent” was well prepared to discourage anyone like Officer Smith who might challenge his being behind the fence where someone had just shot at the president. “He saw me coming with my pistol,” Smith said, “and right away he showed me who he was.”
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“The man, this character,” Smith said in an interview, “produces credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff.”
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However, especially when Officer Smith learned later that there were no real Secret Service agents there, he realized that the man he had confronted, with the smell of gunpowder in the air, didn’t look the part of a Secret Service agent.

“He looked like an auto mechanic.” Smith said. “He had on a sports shirt and sports pants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands. And afterwards it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service.”
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Another witness who met a man behind the fence with Secret Service identification was Gordon L. Arnold, a twenty-two-year-old soldier in uniform. Arnold confronted a “Secret Service agent” at about the same place as Officer Smith did. In Arnold’s case, the encounter happened shortly before the assassination.

Infantryman Gordon Arnold was on leave in Dallas after having completed his basic training. He had brought a movie camera to Dealey Plaza to film the presidential motorcade. He thought the railroad bridge over the triple underpass would give him the best vantage point. To get there, Arnold started walking behind the fence on top of the grassy knoll.
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He found his way blocked quickly by a man in a civilian suit wearing a sidearm.
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The man in the suit told the young soldier he shouldn’t be there. When Arnold challenged the man’s authority, the man pulled out a large identification badge
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and held it toward Arnold. He said, “I’m with the Secret Service. I don’t want anybody up here.”
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Arnold said all right and began walking back along the fence. He could feel the man following him. Arnold stopped halfway down the fence. He looked over it with his camera. It was an ideal place to shoot his film.

The man in the suit came up again.

“I told you,” he said, “to get out of this area.”

Arnold said okay. He walked the complete length of the fence and went around to the top of the grassy knoll. A few minutes later, when the presidential limousine approached, Arnold began filming the president. As he stood with his back to the fence that was three feet behind him, he found himself in the line of fire.

“Just after the car turned onto Elm and started toward me,” he recalled, “a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet, rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear . . . You don’t really hear the whiz of a bullet; you feel it. You feel something go by, and then you hear a report just behind it . . . It was like a crack, just like I was standing there under the muzzle.”
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Arnold hit the dirt. He felt a second shot pass over his head and heard its crack. He knew the feeling. During basic training, he had crawled under live machine gun fire.

When the shooting stopped, while Arnold was still lying on the ground, he felt a sharp kick.

“Get up,” said a policeman standing over him.

A second policeman appeared. He was crying and shaking. In his hands was a long gun that he was waving nervously at Arnold. The two men demanded Arnold’s film.

When Gordon Arnold described his experience years later, he said, “I thought [the man with the gun] was a police officer, because he had the uniform of a police officer. He didn’t wear a hat, and he had dirty hands. But it didn’t really matter much at that time [whether he was a police officer or not]. With him crying like he was, and with him shaking, and with the weapon in his hand, I think I’d have given him almost anything . . .”
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Arnold tossed the movie camera to the first “police officer.” The man opened it, pulled out the film, and threw the camera back to Arnold. The two men in police uniforms left quickly with his film. Arnold would never see or hear of his film again. He ran to his car. Two days later, he was on a plane reporting for duty at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Terrified by his experience on the grassy knoll, he did not report it to authorities.

The deep fear Gordon Arnold felt from the “Secret Service agent,” the two “police officers,” and the bullets that were fired by an assassin a few feet behind him, silenced him for years. He heard about the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the assassination. He had been one of the closest witnesses. He did not want to become one of the dead ones.
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Arnold shared his experience on the grassy knoll with very few people. His story finally became public in 1978 when a Dallas reporter heard about it, and persuaded Arnold to be interviewed.
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According to the testimony of other witnesses, men claiming to be Secret Service agents were collecting critically important evidence immediately after the president was shot. Witness Jean Hill said that when she ran behind the fence of the grassy knoll, men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents held her while they took from her coat pocket all the motorcade pictures she had just put there from her friend Mary Moorman’s Polaroid camera.
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Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, who told the Warren Commission he met up with Secret Service agents behind the wall that adjoined the stockade fence, said he turned over “to one of the Secret Service men” what he believed was a portion of the president’s skull that he had found on Elm Street.
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The counterfeit Secret Service agents who took vital evidence from Hill and Weitzman, like the equally questionable men in police uniforms who took Gordon Arnold’s movie film, were cleaning up the crime scene only seconds after the president was murdered. It was a pattern that would be followed with other critical evidence for the rest of the day.

No one had a more revealing view than did witness Ed Hoffman of what the phony Secret Service agents were facilitating and covering up. Ed Hoffman was uniquely qualified to serve as an eyewitness. He had trained himself to see more sharply than most people because he lacked one sense they had—hearing. Ed Hoffman was a deaf-mute. His keen eyewitness testimony has given us eyes to see behind the fence.

On the morning of November 22, Ed Hoffman, twenty-seven years old, was excused from his job in a machine shop at Texas Instruments in North Dallas because he had broken a tooth. While he was driving to the dentist, he was reminded by seeing the crowds of people along the street that President Kennedy was visiting Dallas that day. Hoffman momentarily forgot about his tooth and decided to stop and see the president, who was expected in a little less than an hour. He parked his car on the broad shoulder of Stemmons Freeway just west of Dealey Plaza, and walked to a point where he would be able to look down from the freeway into the president’s car when it passed below him. He found he also had a panoramic view of the railroad bridge at Dealey Plaza and the area adjoining it behind the wooden fence at the top of the grassy knoll.
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Although he was standing beside a freeway roaring with traffic, he heard none of it. He explained later his attention to what he was seeing: “I think my vision is much sharper than a hearing person’s, because I concentrate totally on what I’m seeing and there are no sounds to distract me. I was really enjoying the view.”
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In the forty-five minutes before the presidential motorcade arrived, Ed Hoffman became completely absorbed in watching the activities of two men behind the stockade fence at the top of the grassy knoll. He saw a stocky man in a dark blue business suit and black hat standing near the fence. In Ed Hoffman’s mind, this was the “suit man.” The second man Hoffman observed was tall, thin, and dressed like a railroad worker. The “railroad man” stood waiting by the switch box at the railroad tracks, where the tracks, after passing across the bridge, ran perpendicular to the fence. Hoffman was puzzled by the fact that the two men, although dressed quite differently, seemed to be working together. The “suit man” kept walking back and forth between the fence and the switch box, where he would confer with the “railroad man.”
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