JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (71 page)

In a second trial before Judge Perry on August 12, 1964, Abraham Bolden was convicted on all three counts. The prosecution’s case featured testimony by indicted counterfeiter Joseph Spagnoli. In his own later trial for counterfeiting, held before the same Judge Perry, Spagnoli shocked the court by confessing on the witness stand that he had perjured himself when he testified against Bolden.
[238]
He said Prosecutor Richard Sikes had told him he should lie.
[239]

In a series of appeals, Abraham Bolden’s conviction was never overturned, in spite of the documented evidence of Judge Perry’s prejudice and Spagnoli’s perjury. Bolden thought pressures from high within the system accounted for both the rigging of his case and the repeated denials of his appeal. He served three years and nine months in federal prisons.
[240]

When he was imprisoned at Springfield Federal Penitentiary, Bolden had prearranged a discreet way to inform his wife and lawyer if he desperately needed help. He would send a letter with a sign only they would recognize, notifying them that the time had come to object strongly to something being done to him.
[241]

That urgent time came soon. The prison authorities committed Bolden to a psychiatric unit. A prison official told him, “You won’t know who you are any more when we get through with you.”
[242]
He was given mind-numbing drugs. Fortunately other prisoners showed him how to fake swallowing the pills. As his situation worsened, Bolden sent the sign-marked letter to his lawyer, who alerted Barbara Bolden. She went immediately to the prison, where she objected strenuously to her husband’s treatment.
[243]

“She saved my life,” Mr. Bolden said repeatedly in my visits with him and Mrs. Bolden, referring especially to her persistent intercession on his behalf while he was in the Springfield psychiatric unit.

In the years while Abraham Bolden was in prison, Barbara Bolden and their two sons and daughter had to endure a series of anonymously engineered attacks at their South Side Chicago home: an attempt to bomb the house; the burning down of their garage; a shot fired through one of their windows; the following of Mrs. Bolden; a brick tossed through the window of her car.
[244]

In December 1967, Bolden was visited at Springfield Penitentiary by three men: his court-appointed attorney, Warren Commission critic Mark Lane, and an assistant to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who by then had begun his investigation into the Kennedy assassination. After hearing Bolden’s story, his visitors publicized widely his testimony to the parallels between the Chicago and Dallas plots. For thus speaking out to the public on the Kennedy assassination via his visitors, Bolden was placed in solitary confinement.
[245]

In the almost four decades since his release from prison in the fall of 1969, Abraham Bolden has continued to speak out to researchers and writers on the Chicago plot against Kennedy, in spite of the chilling consequences he has already suffered. Since his retirement in 2001 as the quality control manager of an industrial firm, Bolden has written his autobiography, whose publication will occur at about the same time as this book’s. I can testify personally to Abraham and the late Barbara Bolden’s warmth, hospitality, and courageous willingness to speak the truth in the face of powerful efforts to deter them. Because they were witnesses to the unspeakable even before John Kennedy was killed, and because they maintained that witness into the next century, we are able to understand the meaning of the Chicago precedent to Dallas.

The Secret Service investigation of the Chicago plot to kill President Kennedy was initially a success story. By disrupting the Chicago plot, the Secret Service had fulfilled its responsibility to protect the president. The FBI’s informant, “Lee,” had somehow made the federal security system work in Chicago as it was supposed to work. “Lee” had whistled the key information on the plot far enough into the system for it to function in Chicago as it was meant to function, in spite of the plotters’ control over major components of the system. It was as if the security alarm bells that the FBI’s Marvin Gheesling had abruptly turned off—by canceling Oswald’s security watch—suddenly rang. But they rang only for a short while, and only in one place, Chicago. Then they became deathly silent again, as the plot moved on to Dallas.

The Secret Service investigation that disrupted the Chicago plot to kill President Kennedy should have disrupted the Dallas plot as well. The central elements were the same in both places: a sniper team waiting in the shadows, complemented by a CIA-connected, “lone nut” patsy positioned in a building directly over the motorcade route. What the Secret Service discovered in Chicago should have made impossible what was then done copycat fashion in Dallas.

However, the plotters reasserted their control. This time they cut the wires of the president’s security alarms. They placed a blanket over Chicago. They smothered the possible pre-assassination testimony of witnesses such as Abraham Bolden, whose whistleblowing, like that of “Lee,” if heard, could have brought the president’s security system to life again. The failed plot’s total cover-up within the government’s police agencies made possible its success the second time around.

Although the failed Chicago plot was hushed up, Thomas Arthur Vallee still became a minor scapegoat. He was the only person arrested in Chicago who was ever identified publicly. Vallee was scapegoated as a threat to the president a month after his arrest and twelve days after Kennedy’s murder in Dallas. On December 3, 1963, an article appeared in the
Chicago American
on Vallee’s November 2 arrest, “Cops Seize Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe.” The unnamed detectives who disclosed Vallee’s month-old arrest characterized him as “a gun-collecting malcontent who expressed violent anti-Kennedy views before the assassination of the late President.”
[246]
A similar article on Vallee’s arrest, drawing on unidentified federal agents, appeared in the
Chicago Daily
News
on the same day.
[247]

The anonymous police detectives and federal agents who informed the media after Dallas of Vallee’s arrest in Chicago one month earlier never mentioned the Secret Service’s detention and questioning of the two suspected snipers. After November 2, 1963, they and their two unapprehended comrades in arms vanished without a trace of their existence. The Dallas plot was then allowed to unfold smoothly, as if it had no Chicago paradigm. Higher orders ensured the necessary amnesia. A Treasury Department official ordered Chicago Police Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland to forget his encounter with Thomas Arthur Vallee. Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau sent the top-secret report of the four-man sniper team to Washington headquarters, where it was made inaccessible. But even that subterranean existence of the Chicago report created a problem for the Secret Service three decades later. In January 1995, the Secret Service deliberately destroyed all its records of the Chicago plot to kill President Kennedy (with other key JFK security documents) when the Assassination Records Review Board requested access to them.
[248]

Once the Chicago plot failed, the Dallas assassination was allowed to happen, unimpeded by the intelligence community’s knowledge of its forerunner. After Dallas, Vallee alone was exposed in Chicago, as if the only precedent were that of another gun-toting malcontent like Lee Harvey Oswald. The real parallels between the two CIA-connected scapegoats, both set up with jobs directly over the president’s motorcade, vanished along with the snipers behind them.

Just as Chicago was the model for Dallas, Saigon was the backdrop for Chicago. The virtual simultaneity of the successful Saigon plot to assassinate Ngo Dinh Diem and the unsuccessful Chicago plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy strongly suggests their having been coordinated in a single, comprehensive scenario. If Kennedy had been murdered in Chicago on the day after Diem’s and Nhu’s murders in Saigon, the juxtaposition of the events would have created the perfect formula to be spoon-fed to the public: “Kennedy murdered Diem, and got what he deserved.”

The legend created for the Dallas scenario of the gun-toting malcontent Lee Harvey Oswald followed a similar pattern. From the claims made by a series of CIA officers to the authors of widely disseminated books and articles, John Kennedy has been convicted in his grave of having tried to kill Fidel Castro, whose supposedly deranged surrogate, Lee Harvey Oswald, then retaliated. As a successful Chicago plot would have done, the Dallas plot ended up blaming the victim: “Kennedy tried to murder Castro, and got what he deserved.”

In the fall of 1963, as the president ordered a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, he was being eased out of control, by friends and foes alike, for the sake of an overriding vision of war. They all thought they knew better than he did what needed to be done to win the war in Vietnam, and elsewhere across the globe against an evil enemy. Kennedy’s horror of the nuclear war he had skirted during the missile crisis, his concern for American troops in Vietnam, and his turn toward peace with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, had, in his critics’ eyes, made him soft on Communism.

For our covert action specialists in the shadows, accountable only to their own shadows, what Kennedy’s apparent defeatism meant was clear. The absolute end of victory over the evil of Communism justified any means necessary, including the assassination of the president. The failed plot in Chicago had to be followed by a successful one in Dallas.

NOTES

[
1
]. Sergei N. Khrushchev,
Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 630.

[
2
]. Ibid.

[
3
]. Ibid., pp. 618-19.

[
4
].
Khrushchev Remembers
, ed. Edward Crankshaw (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 498.

[
5
]. S. Khrushchev,
Nikita Khrushchev
, p. 622.

[
6
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, p. 694.

[
7
]. Ibid.

[
8
]. Ibid., p. 695.

[
9
]. Ibid.

[
10
]. Ibid., p. 696.

[
11
]. Ibid., p. 462.

[
12
]. Ibid., p. 696.

[
13
]. Ibid., p. 698.

[
14
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, October 1962-December 1963
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 880.

[
15
]. William Attwood,
The Twilight Struggle: Tales of the Cold War
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 264. Arthur Schlesinger agreed with Attwood that the CIA was monitoring the Attwood–Lechuga communications: “I think the CIA must have known about this initiative. They must certainly have realized that Bill Attwood and the Cuban representative to the UN were doing more than exchanging daiquiri recipes when they met. They had all of the wires tapped at the Cuban delegation to the United Nations.” Cited by Anthony Summers,
Conspiracy
(New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 401.

[
16
]. Cited by Summers,
Conspiracy,
p. 394.

[
17
]. James P. Hosty, Jr.,
Assignment, Oswald
(New York: Arcade, 1996), p. 166.

[
18
]. John Newman, “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City: Fingerprints of Conspiracy,”
Probe
(September-October 1999), p. 4.