JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (82 page)

As JFK may have recalled from the National Security Council meeting he walked out of in July 1961, the first Net Evaluation Subcommittee report had focused precisely on “a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.”
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Kennedy was a keen reader and listener. In the second preemptive-war report, he may also have noticed the slight but significant discrepancy between its overall time frame,
1963
-1968, and the extent of its relatively reassuring conclusion, which covered only
1964
through 1968.

Although the Net report itself “has not been found,” according to State Department historians,
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nevertheless a memorandum that described it has been discovered. Addressed to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy two weeks before the September 12, 1963, NSC meeting, the memorandum by Colonel W. Y. Smith stated: “the [Net] briefing will cover the results of the studies of a series of general wars initiated earlier during the period
1963
through 1968 . . . Probably the major NESC conclusion is that during the years
1964
through 1968 neither the US nor the USSR can emerge from a full nuclear exchange without suffering very severe damage and high casualties, no matter which side initiates the war.”
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In his cat-and-mouse questioning of his military chiefs, President Kennedy had built upon the report’s apparently reassuring conclusion in such a way as to discourage preemptive-war ambitions. However, given the “late 1963” focus in the first Net Report that that was the most threatening time for a preemptive strike, Kennedy had little reason to be reassured by a second report that implicitly confirmed that time as the one of maximum danger. The personally fatal fall JFK was about to enter, in late 1963, was the same time his military commanders may have considered their last chance to “win” (in their terms) a preemptive war against the Soviet Union. In terms of their second Net Report to the president, which passed over the perilous meaning of late 1963, the cat-and-mouse game had been reversed. It was the generals who were the cats, and JFK the mouse in their midst.

The explicit assumption of the first Net Report was “a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.”
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The focus of that first-strike scenario corresponded to the Kennedy assassination scenario. When President Kennedy was murdered in late 1963, the Soviet Union had been set up as the major scapegoat in the plot. If the tactic had been successful in scapegoating the Russians for the crime of the century, there is little doubt that it would have resulted in “a period of heightened tensions” between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Those who designed the plot to kill Kennedy were familiar with the inner sanctum of our national security state. Their attempt to scapegoat the Soviets for the president’s murder reflected one side of the secret struggle between JFK and his military leaders over a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union. The assassins’ purpose seems to have encompassed not only killing a president determined to make peace with the enemy but also using his murder as the impetus for a possible nuclear first strike against that same enemy.

The incrimination of Lee Harvey Oswald in advance of the assassination continued, even to the point of trying to charter a plane for his apparently intended escape to Cuba, an escape that would never happen.

On Wednesday morning, November 20, 1963, a car with three people in it drove into Red Bird Air Field, on the outskirts of Dallas. The car parked in front of the office of American Aviation Company, a private airline. A heavy-set young man and a young woman got out of the car and entered the office, leaving a second young man sitting in the right front passenger seat.

The man and the woman spoke with American Aviation’s owner, Wayne January, who rented out small planes. They said they wanted to rent a Cessna 310 on the afternoon of Friday, November 22. Their destination would be the Yucatan Peninsula, in southeast Mexico near Cuba.
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The couple asked January unusually detailed questions about the Cessna: How far could it go without refueling? What was its speed? Under certain wind conditions, would it be able to go on to another location?

Wayne January became suspicious. He knew from experience that people didn’t ask those kinds of questions when they chartered an airplane.
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January decided not to rent the Cessna to the couple. He said later that he suspected from their questions that they might have had in mind hijacking the plane to Cuba, just east of the Yucatan Peninsula.
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That may have been exactly what they wanted him to think.

As the couple left his office, expressing irritation at his rejection of their deal, January was curious as to why the other man hadn’t come in with them. He took a good look at the man sitting in the front passenger seat of the car. The following weekend, he recognized on television and in the newspapers the man he’d seen with the couple he suspected of wanting to hijack a plane to Cuba. Their companion had been Lee Harvey Oswald (or someone who bore an exact resemblance to him).

As was the case when he stood on Sylvia Odio’s doorstep between Leopoldo and Angel, Oswald at the Red Bird Air Field was nothing more than a prop in a scene being played out by two other characters. Yet the scene was designed once again to implicate him. Red Bird Air Field was located just five miles south of Oswald’s apartment, a short drive away on the freeway connection. The apparent purpose of the plane-chartering scene, two days before the assassination, was to identify Oswald with a covert plan to fly to Cuba right after the president’s murder.

Because Lyndon Johnson blocked the scapegoating of the Soviet Union and Cuba but failed to confront the CIA, the government also had to cover up the Red Bird incident. Like the Odio incident, it was obvious evidence of a conspiracy—if not by Soviet or Cuban agents, then by U.S. agents.

In 1991, when British author Matthew Smith was examining Kennedy assassination scholar Harold Weisberg’s government documents (obtained under the Freedom of Information Act) in the basement of Weisberg’s Maryland home, he discovered Wayne January’s FBI report on the episode at Red Bird Air Field. Smith then visited Dallas and showed the FBI report to January, who was astounded by what he was described as saying.
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The FBI claimed he said the incident took place in late July 1963, four months before the assassination rather than two days. In that greatly lengthened time span, the FBI also claimed January was uncertain in his identification of Oswald.
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January told Smith that, contrary to the FBI, “It was the Wednesday before the assassination.” With only two days between his look at the man in the car and Oswald’s arrest, January said he was so certain of his identification of Oswald that he “would give it nine out of ten.”
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When Smith commented that the Kennedy assassination was a mystery, he met with resistance. January leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. He said, “The CIA was behind this.”
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Smith said there were other possible involvements to consider. He began listing them. January just looked at him, saying nothing.

When Smith reflected back on January’s quiet certitude, he wondered how he could be so sure the CIA was behind the assassination.
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He would learn later, as we shall, that Wayne January knew much more than he was saying.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was like the sudden coming of a tornado that sucked people up into death, both Kennedy’s death and their own. One such victim was a woman who predicted the killing of Kennedy, Rose Cheramie.

A half day after the incident at Red Bird Air Field, on the night of Wednesday, November 20, Louisiana State Police lieutenant Francis Fruge was called to Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice, Louisiana. There he was given custody of Rose Cheramie (also known as Melba Christine Marcades), a heroin addict who was experiencing withdrawal symptoms. One of two men with whom she was traveling had thrown her out of the Silver Slipper Lounge in Eunice earlier that evening. Cheramie had then been hit by a car, suffering minor abrasions.
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Fruge took Cheramie in an ambulance to East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson for treatment of her withdrawal symptoms. During the two-hour trip, she responded to his questions.

She said she had been driving with the two men from Miami to Dallas before they stopped at the lounge in Eunice. She stated: “We’re going to kill President Kennedy when he comes to Dallas in a few days.”
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Their combined purpose, she said, was “to number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby [being kept by another man], and to kill Kennedy.”
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Because of Cheramie’s condition, Fruge did not take her words seriously.

At the East Louisiana State Hospital on November 21, Rose Cheramie said again, this time to hospital staff members, that President Kennedy was about to be killed in Dallas.
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Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Lieutenant Fruge called the hospital, telling them not to release Cheramie until he could question her further. When he did so on Monday, November 25, Cheramie described the two men driving with her from Miami to Dallas as either Cubans or Italians.
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As Fruge related Cheramie’s story to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, “The men were going to kill Kennedy [in Dallas] and she was going to check into the Rice Hotel [in Houston], where reservations were already made for her, and pick up 10 kilos of heroin from a seaman coming into Galveston. She was to pick up the money for the dope from a man who was holding her baby. She would then take the dope to Mexico.”
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How reliable was Rose Cheramie as a witness? The Louisiana State Police decided to find out.

The police checked on parts of Cheramie’s story with Nathan Durham, the Chief Customs Agent in the Texas region that included Galveston. Durham confirmed that the ship with the seaman Cheramie said had the heroin was about to dock in Galveston.
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The seaman was on it. The police checked out the man holding the money and Cheramie’s baby. He was identified as a suspected dealer in drug traffic.
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Working with Cheramie, the police and customs agents tried to follow and trap the seaman when he disembarked from his ship in Galveston, but the man eluded them.
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In any case, key details in Cheramie’s story had been confirmed by the police and customs authorities.

Colonel Morgan of the Louisiana State Police phoned Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police to tell him about Cheramie’s prediction of the assassination, the confirmed parts of her story, and that the Chief Customs Agent in Houston was holding her for further questioning. When Morgan hung up from his conversation with Fritz, he turned to the other officers in the room and said, “They don’t want her. They’re not interested.”
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By that time Oswald had been captured, jailed, and shot to death by Jack Ruby. The Dallas police wanted no further witnesses to the president’s assassination.

The Chief Customs Agent called FBI agents to pass on the information received from Cheramie: Did they want to talk to her? The FBI said it also did not want to question Rose Cheramie.
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As Cheramie’s story was being confirmed, she also told Francis Fruge that she used to work for Jack Ruby as a nightclub stripper. She said that as a result of her employment by Ruby, she knew Lee Harvey Oswald. Rose Cheramie was a witness not only to participants in the Kennedy assassination traveling to Dallas but also to Ruby and Oswald knowing each other. She said she knew that the two of them had an intimate relationship “for years.”
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Her testimony, if heard, would have contradicted the
Warren Report
’s assertions that Ruby and Oswald were lone killers and had never met.

After both Dallas and federal investigative authorities refused to question Rose Cheramie, the Chief Customs Agent released her in Houston, and she disappeared.

On September 4, 1965, Rose Cheramie’s body was found at 3:00 a.m. on Highway 155, 1.7 miles east of Big Sandy, Texas. Cheramie had reportedly been run over by a car.
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Jerry Don Moore, the driver of the car in question, said he’d been driving from Big Sandy to his home in Tyler. He suddenly saw three or four suitcases lined up in the center of the road. As researcher James DiEugenio summarized Moore’s story, “He swerved to his right to avoid hitting [the suitcases]. In front of him was the prone body of a woman lying at a 90-degree angle to the highway with her head toward the road. Moore applied the brakes as hard as he could.”
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The investigating officer, J. A. Andrews, stated that Moore said, “although he had attempted to avoid running over her, he ran over the top part of her skull, causing fatal injuries.”
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Moore, on the contrary, swore he never hit Cheramie.
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He came close to her, stopped, then drove her to the nearest doctor in Big Sandy. An ambulance took her from the doctor’s to Gladewater Hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival. Although Officer Andrews expressed uncertainty as to what happened to Cheramie, “due to the fact that the relatives of the victim did not pursue the investigation, he closed it as accidental death.”
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