NOTE -- Others besides James DiEugenio and DVP contribute to the discussion below.
KEN S. SAID:
Edwin Black’s original story on the Chicago assassination plot in the Chicago Independent, November 1975, can be found here. Very interesting piece.
M. BALL SAID:
I believe that there was an attempt to be made on 11/2 in Chicago. I believe that [Abraham] Bolden told what he knew about it and was truthful. The Tampa attempt seems to be well documented in Waldron’s book, Ultimate Sacrifice. As to Bolden being set up, I’m a bit skeptical...
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
Having read Edwin Black’s article, I still don’t see any corroboration for Bolden’s account of a 4-man assassination team in Chicago.
I know that a man named Vallee, who had a history of mental illness, was arrested in Chicago, but Bolden’s story didn’t include Vallee according to the HSCA — bottom of the page here.
Although polygraphs aren’t infallible, Black says that Bolden’s results were considered “inconclusive” and that when he was asked to take a followup test, he declined. Unless I missed something, Black found a record for Vallee’s arrest but nothing that confirmed the 4-man team allegation — no statement from another agent or witness, no court or arrest record or anything else. I know that Black believes this story, but based on what evidence? Did I overlook something?
Did author Douglass cite any source other than Bolden for this story of a 4-man team?
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
Jean:
You cannot be serious.
Black’s article is incredibly detailed about the Chicago Plot.
And he begins the article with a bombshell: the tip off guy to the FBI was code named Lee.
Maybe, just maybe, it was that guy you wrote a book about and in yet you could not find any evidence he was [an] FBI informant or a CIA agent provocateur. Was this info in it? Because it makes perfect sense if it's Oswald.
His article was so potent he ended up being tailed by the DIA.
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
Of course I am serious, Jim. What evidence is there that a “tipoff guy to the FBI was code named Lee”? How do you know that’s true?
Isn’t it unusual for an informant to be referred to by his real name, instead of something anonymous like “informant T-2″?
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
Why don’t you ask Edwin Black that?
Meantime, nice way to dodge the question I posed to you: namely what evidence is there in your book that Oswald was an [FBI] informant or an agent provocateur?
The way you slough off all that stuff in New Orleans is reminded [sic] me of Epstein or PJM [Priscilla Johnson McMillan].
And you were just as bad on the Paines, who [sic] you depicted WC style as innocent Good Samaritans. Which was something not even Richard Russell bought back in 1964.
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
My point is that, unlike the Vallee arrest which is well-documented, there doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence for an informant named “Lee” or for the rest of the “4-man team Chicago Plot.” Which is surprising if true, since so many people accept it as fact.
The HSCA interviewed Martineau and the other Chicago agents and didn’t buy this story — it spoke of the “questionable authenticity” of Bolden’s account:
Final Report, p. 232 and footnote 65 here.
Black’s article gives no source for the informant named Lee, so far as I can tell. Douglass’ book repeats the claim — but footnotes Black.
I’m beginning to think “informant Lee” is mythical, like the cab driver Darryl Click.
If I’m wrong, guys, please show me why.
GERRY SIMONE SAID:
Black refers to an ‘unofficial source of ours in the FBI’. Perhaps an unnamed person to protect their anonymity.
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
Thanks, Gerry, but unless I missed it, the unofficial FBI source doesn’t corroborate anything (p. 30 of the article). He said that “once in a great while non-numerical” code names were used for informants in order to protect their identity, but the example he gave was an informant called “D” — not someone going by his real first name, which is really no “code” at all.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
Here is that excellent article:
http://www.thechicagoplot.com/The%20Chicago%20Plot.pdf
Probably one of the very best pieces on the JFK conspiracy written in that decade. Ashamedly, it was ignored.
The stuff Waldron and Hartmann wrote in their book was a mish mash. And then they got the footnotes wrong, which was very fishy as I note in Reclaiming Parkland.
But Jim Douglass did some good work on the failed Chicago Plot. In fact, unlike Vincent Bugliosi, he actually went there and stood in the planned kill zone. The real remarkable thing about it is how much it resembled the ultimate Dallas plot which succeeded.
For instance, the patsy, in this case Vallee, was to be at work in a building floor elevated above the motorcade route. And the motorcade was just turning in front of the building where the ambush was planned.
Like Oswald, Vallee was a former Marine who had trained with Cubans.
Many think, because there is so much evidence to this effect, that the hit team in Dallas was likely Cuban exiles. This appears to be the prospective team in Chicago.
In fact, they are so similar that if there was not a cover up in Chicago, it's hard to think the SS could not have snuffed out Dallas in advance. I mean in three weeks they could not find a tall warehouse building with a former Marine working in it along the motorcade route where the car takes a hard turn?
BTW, would it not be ironic if Oswald warned about both plots? Recall, the Walter telex.
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
Jim,
If the article “corroborates Bolden just about all the way,” could you please quote an example or two of this corroboration?
For instance, could you tell me the source for the claim that there was an informant named “Lee”? Or anything else that clearly corroborates the 4-man rifle team story? That’s all I’m asking.
THREE DAYS LATER, JEAN DAVISON SAID:
Again, Jim, could you please provide some corroboration for the claim that an informant code-named “Lee” blew the whistle on a 4-man hit team in Chicago?
You say that Black’s article “corroborates Bolden just about all the way,” but even Bolden’s own book doesn’t corroborate the details in that article.
JEAN DAVISON LATER SAID:
The arrest of Vallee is well-documented, but there’s evidently no record of a separate 4-man rifle team. Without some evidence, why believe it?
No author’s assertion can establish any fact — it takes evidence to do that.
I’m not sure where Vallee worked, but according to the HSCA he reportedly asked for the day off from his job on Nov. 2, when JFK was supposed to be in Chicago.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
By the way, what these two [Jean Davison and John McAdams] are doing is exactly what Bugliosi does in his book.
He says, well there’s Vallee, but everything else Bolden talked about and tried to tell the Warren Commission about, and then everything that Black spent nine months digging up through documents and shoe leather, somehow Black just made that all up and Bolden was somehow mistaken about why he was sent back to Chicago and set up. And as I said, to use the HSCA against Black, that is just unconscionable. As I said, can Jean really be that wet behind the ears?
Now, with all that in mind, let us note something that neither McAdams nor Jean wants to bring into the thread. Here is the link to Black’s web site:
http://edwinblack.com/
Go ahead and look at all the awards, honors, distinctions and reliable accolades that this investigator/author has had bestowed upon him in the last 30 odd years. Also, please note the subject matter he has addressed. Very controversial and sensitive materials. To emerge as unscathed as he has in those fields is amazing.
Now, since they are the ones bringing this up, it is fair to ask if either one of them has this kind of track record? If so, I have never seen anything like it.
But yet, they feel free to question Black’s methods and honesty? A guy with his illustrious status?
Please. Please. If you are going to do that, then go back and do what he did. Do the ground work, do the door knocking. Don’t be like Vince Bugliosi and never leave your office but then tell us that hey, I wasn’t there, but Chicago did not happen, and Clinton-Jackson did not happen, and Oswald was in Mexico City, and Banister never met Oswald etc etc.
Because other people have done the work and they know better. So these kinds of desktop denials do not ring true light of that. Like Bugliosi, they come off as part of a conclusion driven office agenda from people who don’t know what a field investigation is. Let alone how to do one.
JOHN McADAMS SAID:
Jim,
You seem to be evading a couple of direct challenges from Jean Davison.
You could move the discussion along by giving a direct answer to the following:
1. What is the evidence of a “plot” involving four people?
2. What is the evidence that an informant named “Lee” blew the whistle on any plot?
3. What is the evidence that “Lee” was our boy Lee Harvey Oswald?
JEAN DAVISON SAID:
The suggestion that I’ve “smeared” Edwin Black is ridiculous. I don’t believe that he made anything up. He may have an excellent reputation, but any writer’s claim is either supported by the evidence or it isn’t.
Again, Jim, if Black found corroboration for Bolden’s story of a 4-man assassination team, what is that corroboration? Attacking me can’t disguise the fact that you’ve repeatedly evaded that question.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
Did you read the article? If so, when did you read it? You did the same thing with the “Lee” angle and someone had to quote back the article to you.
Do I now have to quote back to you the whole story he reveals in that long front page essay, which took him nine months to write?
Let me add one last point before I leave this thread...
If we are to take Bugliosi, McAdams and Jean at face value, this is what they want us to think:
Two men who had the same profile, Oswald and Vallee, former Marines, who used to train and interact with Cuban exiles just months before, just happened to think up the same way of killing JFK–in a motorcade with a rifle–from a distance. And they had this same idea within three weeks of each other.
As Mark Lane once said, quoting Zola I think: if we continue to accept absurdities, then we create tragedy.
Which is what has happened with this case.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
There's nothing absurd about the idea that Vallee and Oswald, independent of each other, thought about killing the President with a rifle from a tall building.
That type of action, in fact, would probably be one of the BEST ways for any potential assassin to achieve his goal of killing President Kennedy, who was always riding around in an open-top car.
And in Oswald's case, the "tall building" was something that was ready-made and totally available to him (as a TSBD worker) at the time of JFK's visit to Dallas. So, naturally, Oswald would be thinking along those lines. It was a made-to-order situation for him.
And nothing except ordinary garden-variety luck and happenstance placed Lee Oswald in that building on 11/22/63, and no conspiracy theorist has ever come close to proving that anyone (Ruth Paine or otherwise) "planted" Oswald in the Depository prior to the assassination.
Plus, the "From an office building with a rifle" scenario was such a "generic" type of assassination plan that we've even got President Kennedy HIMSELF suggesting that very idea to Ken O'Donnell in Fort Worth on the very morning JFK was killed [see Kenneth O'Donnell's Warren Commission testimony at 7 H 456].
Plus, Joseph Milteer talked about a possible assassination plot in those exact same type of generic "from an office building with a high-powered rifle" terms in his bugged conversation with William Somersett.
But it couldn't be more obvious that Milteer was merely blowing smoke and had no first-hand knowledge of any type of ACTUAL organizational plan to assassinate the President.
Milteer wasn't even sure WHERE such an attempt was supposed to be made on the President's life. He suggested Miami AND Washington, D.C. (from a point across the street from the White House yet!). So Milteer's rantings are pretty much worthless.
From Vincent Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History" (Page 765 of Endnotes)....
"[Lamar] Waldron's allegation that the mob intended to kill Kennedy in Chicago falls flat on its face because it is 100 percent devoid of any evidence to substantiate it.
To make things worse, even the existence of the alleged four men is seriously in doubt. As indicated in a previous endnote, the HSCA could find no evidence to support Bolden's story.
If possible, Waldron gets even more ridiculous with respect to Tampa. Again, he claims, without offering any evidence to support his position, that Marcello, Trafficante, and Roselli were determined to kill Kennedy in Tampa.
Unbelievably, he offers, as support (which it is not, actually going in the opposite direction), a small article in the Tampa Tribune on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, that three people had threatened to kill Kennedy when he came to Tampa." -- V. Bugliosi
DAVID VON PEIN LATER SAID:
Plus, I agree with Jean Davison regarding the “Lee” code name.
There are people who actually think such a “code name” would have been used by Lee Harvey Oswald? A “code name” that includes the REAL first name of the person?
That sounds kind of crazy to me.
JAMES DiEUGENIO SAID:
[Quoting DVP:] “There’s nothing absurd about the idea that Vallee and Oswald, independent of each other, thought about killing the President with a rifle from a tall building.”
LOL
You left out, within three weeks of each other.
You also left out, they had the same profile, Marines, working with Cubans, alleged misfits.
And Milteer was actually talking about a conspiracy with someone as the patsy Dave. He never named Oswald.
Pity poor Jean if she needs your help. Maybe she doesn’t know about me and you [sic] debating Bugliosi over at Spartacus. You should tell her about it.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Here again we have the incredibly stupid plotters rearing their ugly (and brainless) heads once again. Per the vivid imaginations of conspiracy theorists like Jim DiEugenio, the plotters utilized “patsies” in different cities that have identical type backgrounds (right down to their “Marine” and “Cuban” affiliations), so that crackerjack researchers like Jimmy D. will obviously be able to tell that the Chicago and Dallas “plots” are linked and were constructed by the same unknown “they” that we keep hearing the conspiracists ramble on about (CIA?).
Brilliant planning, Jim. (But the Chicago “plot” was never supposed to come to the surface, was it? Maybe that’s the excuse Jim will use to combat my last point above.)
And also don’t forget the utter brilliance being displayed by the bad guys when they also allegedly arranged for a “4-man hit team” in Chicago (in order to somehow pin the whole nine yards on just ONE lone patsy named Thomas Vallee), and then they orchestrated another MULTI-ASSASSIN murder plot within the framework of yet another “Frame The Lone Patsy” (Oswald) plan in Dallas, Texas, twenty days later.
Incredibly, people like James DiEugenio have actually fallen for such tommyrot, despite the fact that every scrap of physical evidence in the whole JFK case is screaming “It was Oswald alone”.
So, either Jim’s plotters were incredibly lucky when all of the “non-Oswald” evidence just disappeared into a puff of smoke on 11/22/63,
or:
Various law enforcement agencies (DPD, FBI, Sheriff’s office, Secret Service, etc.) decided to immediately join ranks with the plotters who were supposedly setting up Oswald IN ADVANCE of the assassination, with those law agencies deep-sixing every last piece of evidence pointing to any shooters other than Lee Harvey Oswald.
In other words, in James DiEugenio’s strange universe of conspiracy, it was
“The World vs. Patsy Oswald”.
David Von Pein
June 2014
