JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (87 page)

Hoffman also noticed two cars drive into the parking lot behind the fence: first, a white four-door; then a light green Rambler station wagon. Hoffman thought the drivers were looking for parking spaces. After driving through the parking lot, the Rambler station wagon parked near a railroad switching tower. Ed Hoffman’s sharp eye had just spotted a vehicle that he and other witnesses would identify as a getaway vehicle in the hour ahead.
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When Hoffman sensed that the presidential limousine (which he could not see) was approaching, he saw the “suit man” walk over to the “railroad man” a final time, speak briefly, and return to the fence. The “suit man” crouched down and stood up, apparently picking something up. He looked over the fence. In the silent drama Ed Hoffman was watching, he then saw a puff of smoke by the “suit man.” He assumed it was from a cigarette.
[255]
He soon realized the smoke had come from the firing of a rifle he was unable to hear.

Hoffman saw the “suit man” turn suddenly with a rifle in his hands. He ran to the “railroad man,” tossing the rifle to him over a thin, horizontal pipe about four feet off the ground. The “railroad man” caught the rifle, breaking it down with a twist. He thrust it in a railroad worker’s soft brown tool bag and ran north along the tracks. The “suit man” turned back, assumed a casual pose, and began strolling alongside the fence.
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A police officer came quickly around the fence and confronted the “suit man” with a revolver. The “suit man” held out his empty hands. He then took what was apparently identification out of his coat pocket and showed it to the police officer. The officer put his gun away. The “suit man” mingled with the crowd of people that was coming around the fence.
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He then “walked over to the Rambler wagon and got in on the passenger side. The Rambler station wagon drove out of the parking lot along the north side of the [Texas School Book Depository]. Hoffman last saw this vehicle as it made a right turn onto Houston Street.”
[258]

Ed Hoffman’s attention switched to the presidential limousine, as it was then being driven below him onto Stemmons Freeway. He looked down on President Kennedy’s body sprawled across the back seat, with a gaping wound in his right rear skull. It looked like bloody Jello.
[259]

Hoffman was unable to see anything more behind the fence. A slowly moving freight train had crossed the railroad bridge and was blocking his view. Realizing he had witnessed the assassination of the president, he became overwhelmed by the need to let people know that he had seen the man with the rifle. He ran to his car. He made visits to Dallas Police Headquarters and the FBI office that proved futile. In the wake of the assassination, no one was patient enough to understand a seemingly obsessed man who was unable to speak.

Hoffman’s biggest hope was to communicate what he had seen to his father. Frederick Hoffman, a florist, was his son’s best friend and a hearing person who knew sign language. Ed hoped his father would help him tell his story to the authorities. However, when Ed finished telling Frederick excitedly in sign how he had seen the man who killed the president, his father was strangely resistant to the idea of phoning the police. (Ed would realize later that his father recognized Ed was in a dangerous position and was trying to protect him.) After Oswald was arrested and shown on television, Ed insisted the police had the wrong man from the wrong place, the Texas School Book Depository, not the man with the rifle he had seen behind the fence. Yet his father continued to put him off. He finally agreed to help Ed tell his story to his Uncle Bob—Lieutenant Robert Hoffman, a Dallas Police detective—during the Hoffman family’s Thanksgiving gathering, six days after the assassination.
[260]

After Frederick Hoffman had interpreted Ed’s story in detail on Thanksgiving Day, detective Robert Hoffman stood up for emphasis and spoke seriously to his nephew. What Ed saw from his father’s translation was:

“Your father is right. You should keep quiet about this. You might be in danger.”

Ed argued against his uncle and father. He signed in protest to them: “The real killers got away! The authorities don’t know about the shot from behind the fence. They have to be notified!”

The Dallas Police lieutenant’s response, through the signing of Ed’s father, was even more emphatic:
“You stay-down. Hush! You talk, you get-shot!”
[261]

For three and a half years, Ed Hoffman followed his father’s and his uncle’s counsel that he keep quiet about the assassination. Then, compelled by his conscience and without his father’s knowledge, Hoffman made an appointment with the Dallas FBI office for June 28, 1967. With no sign language interpreter present, he tried to give his testimony on what he had seen behind the fence to Special Agent Will Hayden Griffin by means of gestures, sketches, and notes made up of sentence fragments. Griffin’s subsequent report was so filled with transcription errors, if not deliberate misrepresentations, that it ultimately had Hoffman saying he “could not have seen the [two] men running because of a fence west of the Texas School Book Depository building.”
[262]

Nevertheless, Griffin did understand Hoffman well enough to think it advisable to offer him a bribe to remain silent about what he knew.

After Hoffman had used every means at his command to communicate his knowledge of the assassination, Agent Griffin smiled at him. He pointed his index finger at Hoffman, for the word, “you.” Griffin put his finger to his mouth, meaning “hush.” He mimed taking his wallet from his hip pocket and giving Hoffman something from it. To indicate what that would be, he held out his hand with his fingers extended—for the number 5—then closed his hand twice into a fist, for “00.”

Hoffman was shocked. He immediately gestured to Griffin his refusal of the bribe.

Griffin’s smile passed into a stern, almost angry expression. He gestured more earnestly to Hoffman, “You hush!”
[263]

After Ed Hoffman left, agent Griffin phoned Frederick Hoffman about his son’s visit to the FBI office. Frederick was appalled at what Ed had done. When Ed stopped by his father’s flower shop, Frederick told him in despair, “I can’t do anything about it if they shoot you, too!”
[264]

A week later, the FBI interviewed Frederick Hoffman, asking him to assess his son’s testimony. Hoffman continued to fear that Ed would be killed if he were identified as an assassination witness. He was therefore not about to confirm the likely truth of Ed’s story. Yet he could not deny his son’s integrity. Ed’s brother, Fred, who was present at their father’s FBI interview, claimed that Frederick ended up making a confusing, agnostic statement to the FBI: “I don’t know if Ed saw what he saw.”
[265]

Frederick Hoffman may have realized the FBI would give his words a negative twist in their report, as they did: “The father of Virgil [Edward] Hoffman stated that he did not believe that his son had seen anything of value . . .”
[266]

After his father’s death in 1976, Ed Hoffman made a final attempt on March 25, 1977, with the partial help of interpreters, to communicate his knowledge to the FBI. The FBI’s report was again so full of errors that it bore little resemblance to Hoffman’s testimony.
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It was only in 1989 with the publication of Jim Marrs’s book
Crossfire
, containing Hoffman’s story as given through an interpreter, that Ed Hoffman was finally able to tell an attentive audience what he had seen behind the fence of the grassy knoll.
[268]

Ed Hoffman had witnessed a critically important scene in the assassination scenario. The “suit man,” who tossed the rifle to the “railroad man” for rapid disposal, had been equipped beforehand with a powerful means of identification. His just showing it at the murder scene, with the smell of gunpowder still in the air, had so reassured a suspicious police officer, Joe Marshall Smith, that he immediately put his gun away and let the suspect go without detaining or questioning him.
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The man, whose credentials passed him off as a Secret Service agent, was in fact a methodical assassin in an orchestrated killing of the president. Moments before, as Hoffman had seen, the documented “Secret Service agent” had fired his rifle at President Kennedy before tossing it to an assistant. Thus, the assassins were not only well prepared to identify themselves as government agents. They also seemed confident that they would not be exposed from their bold use of Secret Service credentials to assure their escape. They were right. The Warren Commission went out of its way to ignore the obvious evidence of Secret Service imposters at a source of the shots.

As we learned from Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, the Secret Service took the extraordinary step of withdrawing and replacing all of its agents’ commission books a month and a half following the assassination, moving Bolden to suspect that Secret Service identification had been used as a cover by the assassins of President Kennedy. Officer Joe Marshall Smith, who was familiar with Secret Service credentials, said he had confronted a man behind the fence at the top of the grassy knoll who showed him such credentials. That raises the question: What was the source of the Secret Service identification displayed by JFK’s assassins?

In June 2007, in response to a fifteen-year-old Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA finally declassified its “Family Jewels” report. Buried in the 702-page collection of documents was a memorandum written by Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was the notorious designer of the CIA’s contaminated skin diving suit intended in the spring of 1963 for the assassination of Castro, the scapegoating of Kennedy, and the destruction of an incipient Cuban–American rapprochement.

In his secret May 8, 1973, CIA memorandum, Sidney Gottlieb stated that “over the years” his Technical Services Division “furnished this [Secret] Service” with “gate passes, security passes, passes for presidential campaign, emblems for presidential vehicles; a secure ID photo system.”
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The Secret Service supposedly received its identifying documents from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, as Abraham Bolden said it did in the replacement of its agents’ commission books in January 1964.
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Since the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is, like the Secret Service, a part of the Treasury Department, it is reasonable in terms of in-house security and accessibility that it—and especially not the CIA—would provide the Secret Service commission books. Yet here is the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb acknowledging that “over the years” his Technical Services Division “furnished” such identification to the Secret Service—identification that could just as easily have been given at any time, as might prove useful, to CIA operatives using a Secret Service cover. The source was the same.

There is a certain criminal consistency between Gottlieb’s having prepared a poisoned diving suit meant for Castro’s murder and his perhaps having furnished as well the Secret Service credentials used by the assassins on the grassy knoll. However, Gottlieb was only a CIA functionary who carried out higher orders. The more responsible assassins were above him.

What does the phenomenon of a sniper team supplied with official government credentials for an immediate cover-up tell us about the forces behind the crime?

Would an innocent government, in its investigation of the murder of its president, ignore such evidence of treachery within its own ranks?
[272]

A key to John Kennedy’s presidency, and to its end in Dallas, was his extraordinary, ongoing communication with his Communist adversary, Nikita Khrushchev.

According to the official State Department record,
Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges
, the last such exchange between Chairman Khrushchev and President Kennedy happened on October 10, 1963.
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On that day in Moscow, after a ceremony in which Khrushchev proudly signed the historic Limited Test Ban Treaty, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin handed U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler a letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy.

Foy Kohler was not an ambassador on the same wave length as his president. JFK had appointed Kohler, a rigid Cold Warrior recommended by the Foreign Service,
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only when Robert Kennedy, who strongly opposed him, was unable to come up with an alternative.
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When Kohler wired to the State Department what would turn out to be the final Khrushchev–Kennedy letter, he characteristically dismissed its significance in a way that Kennedy would not have. Kohler’s telegram stated that the Khrushchev letter contained “nothing new of substance.”
[276]
While that may have been technically true, Khrushchev considered his letter to Kennedy, issued on the occasion of their greatest mutual achievement, at least important enough for the Soviet leader to have it broadcast over Moscow Radio that same evening. Kennedy would have thought it important enough, at the very least, for Khrushchev to receive a reply from him. That was not to happen.