Authors: Lamar Waldron
rifle that was found was the same one that Oswald apparently ordered.5
However, even Warren Commission and military testimony confirm the
rifle found on the sixth floor had a scope that “was installed as if for a
left-handed man.” All evidence shows that Oswald was right-handed,
despite later questioning of Marina Oswald and grilling of Lee’s brother
in a vain attempt to show otherwise. Also, the scope was so badly mis-
aligned that shots later fired by military experts all landed “high and
to the right of the target.” This was no accident caused by a fleeing
assassin’s dropping the rifle and knocking the scope out of alignment.
Military experts at the Aberdeen Proving Ground would later tell the
Warren Commission that “three shims [had been] placed in the scope,”
as it was found on the sixth floor.6
None of those problems would be publicized as they became known.
But stories about the mail-order rifle soon filled the airwaves and news-
papers, as if they were the final link in the chain of Oswald’s guilt. On
the other hand, news about evidence that raised the possibility of other
assassins was summarily dismissed—and in some cases, even the physi-
cal evidence disappeared. One example is the skull fragment mentioned
earlier, which was found on the median across from the grassy knoll,
ten feet behind the position of JFK’s limo—a location that could have
indicated a fatal head shot from the front. The skull piece itself was from
the back of JFK’s head, which also tended to indicate that a shot from
the front had blown the piece out of the back of his skull. The piece was
found by a college student, then examined and photographed by three
doctors, including the chief pathologist at the Methodist Hospital in
Dallas. They forwarded it to Dr. Burkley in Washington, who gave it to
the FBI, who also notified the Secret Service. The 2.75-by-2.2-inch piece
from the back of JFK’s skull then vanished, though its existence is con-
firmed by photographs and Congressional investigators. Apparently,
the main autopsy physician was not told about the bone fragment.7 On
Saturday, November 23, he was still working on his first autopsy report
when he first learned from a Parkland doctor that JFK’s body had a
throat bullet wound, under the tracheotomy incision.
The skull fragment is just one example of how the official story of
Oswald as a “lone assassin,” which dominated the Saturday newspapers
and constant TV news coverage, was far different from what officials
would say in private, or reveal much later. Newspapers that weekend
cited Dallas Police Chief Curry as saying the case against Oswald was
solid, but just a few years later Curry would admit: “We don’t have
any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been
able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”8 According to
Vanity Fair,
Curry himself “believed two gunmen were involved” in the
assassination, though not a hint of that belief appeared in the press that
weekend or in the months to come.9
Even J. Edgar Hoover admitted to Lyndon Johnson, in a recorded
phone call at 10:01 AM on November 23, that “the case, as it stands now,
isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.”10 Yet the Saturday
morning newspapers were conveying just the opposite impression by
establishing the basic “lone assassin” scenario that some people still
believe today. In hindsight, it seems absurd to think that all the rel-
evant information about the shooting, and an unusual former defector
like Oswald, could be uncovered less than twenty-four hours after the
shooting—and that clearly wasn’t the case. However, investigations that
touched on covert matters would have to be conducted in secret, so as
not to alarm the public or back LBJ into a corner regarding possible
retaliation against Cuba or the Soviet Union.
In using their positions and media contacts to control the official
release of information, key officials—including LBJ, Hoover, Bobby, the
Secret Service, the Dallas Police, and the US military—were acting both
in the national interest and in their own self-interest. The more attention
focused on Oswald as a “lone nut” who hadn’t acted on anyone else’s
behalf or with any confederates, the less chance the press or local law
enforcement had of exposing leads or information that could cause prob-
lems with Cuba or Russia. For Dallas officials, limiting matters to the
seemingly Marxist Oswald made the conservative city look better, and
prevented any chance of exposing locals who might have used Oswald
for their own purposes. The police had their man, and it was simply
best not to look into evidence to the contrary because of the potentially
troubling questions it could raise.
In some cases, as in squelching the story of the Tampa assassination
attempt, top officials and agencies probably had to rely on press contacts
to keep certain stories from being pursued. Fourteen years after Dallas,
in generally more liberal times after Watergate and Vietnam, reporter
Carl Bernstein would write in
Rolling Stone
that hundreds of journalists
were involved in the “long-standing cooperation between the CIA and
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
many media organizations, involving resource sharing, secrecy agree-
ments, and covert operations. Among the media involved, he said, were
the three major television networks;
Time
and
Newsweek
magazines; the
New York Times
; and the Associated Press and United Press Interna-
tional.”11 The vast majority of the CIA’s press contacts have never been
exposed, though a few memos have been declassified, listing various
journalists as “unwitting collaborators” if they were fed information
that they didn’t realize originated with the CIA, and as “witting col-
laborators” if they did. Some Miami journalists covering anti-Castro
operations even received their own CIA code names (AMCARBON-1,
AMCARBON-2, etc.).12
Journalists withholding information from the public didn’t have to
be made aware of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or the Cuba Contingency
Plans to protect it. They could simply be told that certain information
was too sensitive, could compromise US operations, or might force a
confrontation with the Soviets—and just a year after the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis, this last explanation might be all that was required, since
Oswald’s Soviet and Cuba connections had been so widely reported.
We know that when information linking Oswald to David Ferrie started
to surface during the weekend after JFK’s murder, an NBC cameraman
related that “an FBI agent said that I should never discuss what we
discovered for the good of the country.”13 That same phrase, “for the
good of the country,” would be used to stop Dave Powers and Kenneth
O’Donnell from revealing they had seen shots from the grassy knoll,
and it was probably used to silence others as well. Longtime television
journalist Peter Noyes was told by several “members of NBC News
who covered the events in Dallas [that] they were convinced their supe-
riors wanted certain evidence suppressed at the request of someone in
Washington.”14
Some US officials dealing with media assets might have been aware
only that Oswald had been under US surveillance before the assas-
sination, something that not only would have been embarrassing for
the FBI, CIA, and Naval Intelligence if it were revealed, but also could
expose the rather large domestic surveillance program those agencies
ran, which was technically illegal. (Each time Congressional hearings
threatened to fully expose those operations in the 1970s, the hearings
were overshadowed by other events—first Watergate, and then the first
revelations of the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots to the public.)
Any official who actually had access to some of the surveillance might
have believed Oswald acted alone, because the record showed it was
unlikely he had any associates or contacts that US intelligence didn’t
know about. In fact, many of his associates were themselves of interest
to US intelligence (which is why some of them helped with the surveil-
lance). Some officials might have known that Oswald was some type of
US intelligence asset, and simply thought he had turned “bad.” All of
these are reasons for officials to pressure certain journalists to withhold
information, without requiring either the official or the journalist to be
told about the JFK-Almeida coup plan.
The officially sanctioned story of “lone nut” Oswald that quickly
emerged was limited to the evidence that had already become widely
known. Anything else was quickly suppressed, like the newspaper
article about the Tampa assassination attempt that appeared on Satur-
day, November 23. The article appeared only in the
Tampa Tribune;
it was
based on information from Tampa Police Chief Mullins and also cited a
White House Secret Service memo. The November 8 memo quoted in the
article said a “subject made statement of a plan to assassinate the Presi-
dent . . . stated he will use a gun. . . . Subject is described as: white, male,
20, slender build.” That description matches Lee Oswald’s much better
than the initial one issued in Dallas, which described the suspect as
being much older and heavier. The sheriff of a county adjacent to Tampa
confirmed in the article that officers had been “warned about ‘a young
man’ who had threatened to kill the President during that trip.”15
In the article, Chief Mullins mentioned another man at large, identi-
fied as a threat, and wondered “if the . . . two may have followed the
Presidential caravan to Dallas.” Mullins didn’t know about the two men
who had left Florida for Texas, with Rose Cheramie, shortly after the
Tampa attempt. Also unknown to Mullins at that time, Gilberto Poli-
carpo Lopez—the young Cuban exile linked to the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee, who had so many recent parallels to Oswald—had indeed
headed to Texas. Once Lopez was in Texas, Congressional investigators
found that he “crossed the border into Mexico,” then went to Mexico
City and into Cuba, just as Oswald had tried to do in late September.
Lopez used the same border crossing as Oswald, and apparently like
Oswald on the return leg of his Mexico trip, “crossed [the border] in
a privately owned automobile owned by another person.”16 Someone
had to be helping each man, since neither owned a car or had a driver’s
license.
The description cited in the Tampa article is also close to Lopez’s.
Clearly, if JFK had been killed in Tampa, authorities would have
already been primed to look for a suspect like Lopez or Oswald (whose
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
whereabouts the day before the Tampa attempt have never been deter-
mined; one unconfirmed report places him in Tampa, meeting with asso-
ciates of Lopez). We noted previously an unconfirmed newspaper report
placing Lopez in Dallas on the day of the assassination. If films and
eyewitnesses had pointed so overwhelmingly to an additional shooter in
Dallas that they couldn’t be ignored, Lopez probably would have been
fingered by one of the CIA assets working for Marcello, Trafficante, or
Rosselli. If the public found out that an accused shooter was a Cuban, or
that he had fled to Cuba, it’s not hard to imagine the outcry that would
have resulted from Congress and the public for an invasion of Cuba.
We feel that’s exactly what the mob bosses and their allies, like David
Morales and John Martino, had wanted to happen. They didn’t care
if JFK’s murder was blamed on one assassin or two—only that those
blamed were linked to Cuba.
Neither this
Tampa Tribune
article nor anything about the Tampa
attempt was ever brought to the attention of the Warren Commis-
sion or any of the later investigating committees, like the House Select
Committee on Assassinations. We discovered it only after reviewing
thousands of pages of newspaper microfilm in Tampa and Miami, pain-
stakingly reading through each edition (there were often several editions
in one day, especially during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or
JFK’s assassination).
When we contacted Mullins in 1996, he confirmed everything in the
article and provided additional information, as well as referring us to
more law enforcement sources who had been involved in dealing with
the Tampa attempt. (One high Florida law enforcement official provided
additional information about Trafficante’s involvement in the attempt
and told us that Gilberto Lopez appeared to be an informant for some
government agency.) Chief Mullins, by then long retired, said he was
surprised he had never been contacted by reporters or government
researchers in the thirty-three years since the article appeared, and that
news about the Tampa threat had never been mentioned in any of the