5
Previous Plots against President Kennedy
President Kennedy was being stalked. Contrary to the general notion of great shock at the President’s assassination manifested in the Report of the Warren Commission, it was a known fact that in 1963, Kennedy’s life was in danger from serious threat levels that had been positively identified by the United States Secret Service.58
The conspiracy plot against President Kennedy in Chicago was very real,59 and the Secret Service was acutely aware of it.60 Former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden wrote an entire book about that plot and its implications.61
The conspiracy plot against President Kennedy in Tampa, Florida, was also very real.62 The Secret Service was also aware of that plot.63
Those facts have been documented substantially in several books including Ultimate Sacrifice, a good place to begin if you wish to research those points in great detail. In both of those cases—Chicago and Tampa—the conspiracy plot was virtually identical to the conspiracy plot that finally killed JFK in Dallas, a short time after those first two attempts. It was a set-up, with plans for multiple shots from a high-powered rifle, complete with a patsy who was framed to take the blame by being set up as a “lone nut” who was a disenchanted soldier with a strange background; and the patsy was tied to the crime by falsely manufactured evidence, just like Oswald was a few weeks later.64
Right after that serious plot against the President’s life in Chicago was averted, and just prior to JFK’s trip to Tampa—only four days before he was shot dead in Dallas—authorities became aware of another serious threat against his life.
Authorities had received credible reports of threats against JFK, and Tampa authorities had uncovered a plan to assassinate JFK during his long motorcade there. . . . Long-secret Congressional reports confirm that ‘the threat on November 18, 1963, was posed by a mobile, unidentified rifleman shooting from a window in a tall building with a high power rifle fitted with a scope.’65
So the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Secret Service were both aware of those plots and that has been documented:
One Secret Service agent told Congressional investigators that ‘there was an active threat against the President of which the Secret Service was aware in November 1963 in the period immediately prior to JFK’s trip to Miami made by ‘a group of people.’’66
By the way, take note of those words that were above, “a group of people.” Guess what, that’s the legal definition of a conspiracy, and that’s coming to us direct from the United States Secret Service!
The police protection for Kennedy during that Tampa trip was also made aware that there was a serious threat. And so was President Kennedy himself:
The Tampa threat was confirmed to us by Chief of Police (J. P.) Mullins, who also confirmed that it wasn’t allowed to be published at the time. However, as with Chicago, JFK knew about the Tampa assassination threat. In the words of a high Florida law-enforcement official at the time, ‘JFK had been briefed he was in danger.’67
In author Vince Palamara’s new book, Survivor’s Guilt, he examines the Secret Service’s protection of JFK:
Secret Service agents in Tampa were probably subjected to the same pressure for secrecy as those in Chicago. . . . It also explains why, in the mid-1990s, the Secret Service destroyed documents about JFK’s motorcades in the weeks before Dallas, rather than turn them over to the Assassinations Records Review Board as the law required.68
The issue of threats against the President was mostly kept out of the newspapers:
While all news of the threat was suppressed at the time, two small articles appeared right after JFK’s death, but even then the story was quickly suppressed.69
Of course, the Warren Commission—which historian Walt Brown more properly dubbed the “Warren Omission”—neglected to inform the American public about the true and known nature of the previous plots.70 But that’s probably about what you figured, right? Just because they were sworn to serve the public they supposedly represented didn’t stop them from following their own pre-formed agenda.
So it was very clear that President Kennedy was being set up. Keep that point in your mind as you read the upcoming entries on the horribly inadequate security precautions in Dallas.
And the similarities are unnerving. Chicago, then Tampa, then Dallas; they all followed the same M.O. and they were one right after the other:
The Tampa attempt . . . involved at least two men, one of whom threatened to ‘use a gun’ and was described by the Secret Service as ‘white, male, 20, slender build,’. . . According to Congressional investigators, ‘Secret Service memos’ say ‘the threat on November 18, 1963, was posed by a mobile, unidentified rifleman shooting from a window in a tall building with a high powered rifle fitted with a scope.’ That was the same basic scene in Chicago and Dallas.71
And even more unnerving is the fact that all three plots —Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas—also used the same M.O. to set up their designated “patsy”:
What made the attempts to kill JFK in Chicago and Tampa [and later Dallas] different from all previous threats was the involvement of Cuban suspects—and a possible Cuban agent—in each area. In addition, these multi-person attempts were clearly not the work of the usual lone, mentally ill person, but were clearly the result of coordinated planning.
In both the Tampa and Dallas attempts, officials sought a young man in his early twenties, white with slender build, who had been in recent contact with a small pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In Dallas that was Lee Harvey Oswald, but the Tampa person of interest was Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, who—like Oswald—was a former defector.72
Cuban dissidents and a former defector; well my, my, doesn’t that have a familiar ring? That’s not just similar, that’s downright eerie.
In Ultimate Sacrifice, Waldron and Hartmann document “eighteen parallels between Dallas suspect Lee Harvey Oswald and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez . . .” (and) here are a few:
Like Oswald, Lopez was also of interest to Navy intelligence.
Also similar to Oswald, Gilberto Lopez made a mysterious trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, attempting to get to Cuba.
Lopez even used the same border crossing as Oswald, and government reports say both went one way by car, though neither man owned a car. Like Oswald, Lopez had recently separated from his wife and had gotten into a fistfight in the summer of 1963 over supposedly pro-Castro sympathies. Declassified Warren Commission and CIA documents confirm that Lopez, whose movements parallel Oswald in so many ways in 1963, was on a secret ‘mission’ for the U.S. involving Cuba, an ‘operation’ so secret that the CIA felt that protecting it was considered more important than thoroughly investigating the JFK assassination.73
So there weren’t just previous plots—there were actually previous plots using the exact same method of setting up the patsy to take the fall for a very sophisticated assassination scenario.
58 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt.
59 Waldron, Lamar & Hartmann, Thom, Ultimate Sacrifice (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).
60 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt.
61 Bolden, Abraham, The Echo from Dealey Plaza: The true story of the first African American on the White House Secret Service detail and his quest for justice after the assassination of JFK (Crown: 2008).
62 Kelly, William, “The Tampa Plot in Retrospect,” July 7, 2012: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/07/tampa-plot-in-retrospect.html and Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice
63 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt.
64 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice, 145.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt.
69 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice, 254.
70 Walt Brown, Ph.D., The Warren Omission.
71 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice, cited in: William Kelly, “The Tampa Plot in Retrospect,” July 7, 2012: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/07/tampa-plot-in-retrospect. html
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.