Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

534  Identity of informant "Lee"


Compare:
223 Tampa Police Department files on 11-18-63 JFK threat

There are strong indications that four men were in Chicago to assassinate John F. Kennedy on November 2, 1963, twenty days before Dallas.

November 2, 1963, JFK was scheduled to attend the Army-Air Force game at Soldiers Field. Plans called for him to arrive at O'Hare around 11 a.m., motorcade down what was then
known as the Northwest Expressway to the Loop. At Jackson the caravan would lumber up the Jackson exit, make a slow difficult left-hand turn onto the street and shuttle over to the stadium. The Jackson exit would be crowded with no fewer than 45 local school and civic organizations anxious to see the President. As in Dallas, JFK's limousine would pass through a warehouse district —which Secret Service advance men considered 10 times more deadly than any office building corridor. As in Dallas, JFK's limousine would be forced to make a difficult 90-degree turn that would slow them to practically a standstill.


The Expressway in the 1950s

Wednesday, October 30, three days before our coordination meeting was held in the anteroom of Mayor Daley's fifth floor City Hall office. Attending were various Secret Service officials, three Deputy Chiefs of Police and Captain Robert Linsky, the security liaison between the Chicago Police and the Secret Service. As the security plans for Kennedy's visit were mapped, each Deputy Chief was assigned an area of responsibility. Patrol Deputy Rocheford took the airport; traffic Deputy Madl took the motorcade route and its precarious passage under those deadly overpasses; Captain Linsky took the Conrad Hilton, the stadium itself and various street security functions. Mayor Daley’s special events man, Jack Riley, stopped in to extend his boss’ hope for a safe visit.

A few hours after that meeting adjourned, the phone rang in the Chicago office of the Secret Service. Agent Jay Lawrence Stocks was for a few hours the ranking agent, so he took the
call. It was the Federal Bureau of Investigation calling from Washington. The FBI man warned Stocks of a serious and dangerous four-man conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy at the Army Air Force game. The suspects were right wing para-military fanatics armed with rifles and telescopic sights. The assassination itself would probably probably be attempted at one of the Northwest Expressway overpasses. This information came from an informant named "Lee".

(Edwin Black, The Chicago Plot, November 1975)

536  Records of weapons in Chicago rooming house


Continued from:
535 Chicago office teletypes

        "When we went looking for the receipts,
we discovered they had been routinely destroyed several years ago."


A break came the next day, Thursday, October 31. A near north rooming house landlady telephoned the Chicago police with a tip. Four men were renting rooms, and in one of them, she observed four rifles with telescopic sights. In as much as she knew the president was coming to Chicago in two days, perhaps there was some threat here. Would the police look into it. The police immediately informed the Secret Service. Acting agent in charge of Maurice G. Martineau scooped up the message and made the connection. This was it.


Maurice G. "Marty" Martineau, 95, passed away on Oct. 8, 2009.

A 24-hour surveillance was set up on the rooming house. Agent Jay L. Stocks spotted and followed two men fitting in the landlady's description, all the time maintaining radio contact with Martineau. Stocks was growing tired when the subject vehicle headed back to the rooming house in the vicinity of Clark and Division. Stocks, maintaining a discreet distance, followed their car into an alley behind the rooming house. Unfortunately, it was a one-way alley. When suddenly the subject decided not to park in the alley and turnaround to exit, they were forced to squeeze past Stocks 's car.

Stocks saw the men driving his way. Tried to maneuver his car around in time, but couldn't. A message came over the radio before Stocks could reach over and turn the volume button down. As the suspects passed Stocks' car, they heard the radio message, looked him in the eye and took off. Stocks reluctantly replied to Martineau that the surveillance was blown — before any real evidence could be amassed.

Martineau thought, Bust them now, with or without the evidence.


The subject vehicle headed back to the rooming house in the vicinity of Clark and Division.

The two men were taken into custody (but not actually arrested or booked) in the very early Friday hours and brought to the Secret Service headquarters. There are no records that any weapons were found in their possession or back at the rooming house.

(...)

All weapons are inventoried when seized. The crime laboratory tests them and, and issues a weapons receipt. We found the confidential weapons inventory records. [Thomas Arthur] Vallee's rifles were registered. So were other long guns, but it was impossible to identify them without the corresponding receipts. When we went looking for the receipts, we discovered they had been routinely destroyed several years ago.

Working against us was not only a conspiracy, but a bureaucracy.

(Edwin Black, The Chicago Plot, November 1975)

538 Registration for the licence plate on Thomas Arthur Vallees car


Continued from:
537 Identity of four man shooter team Chicago

        "The registration for the licence plate on the car
    Thomas Arthur Vallee was driving at the time of his arrest was classified
                            - restricted to US intelligence agencies."

Erasing the Past...Discussions

An unknown source accused a man named Thomas Arthur Vallee of threatening to assassinate JFK. Although Vallee was not associated with the two men in custody, he appeared to be a right–wing extremist and he certainly owned several guns and a large quantity of ammunition. At about 9 o’clock on Saturday morning, two hours before Kennedy was due to land at O’Hare, Vallee was stopped by the police on the pretext of having committed a minor driving offence, and was arrested.

Threats of violence against political figures happen all the time. The significance of the Chicago plot, if there was one, rested on its apparent similarities to the events in Dallas three weeks later. In particular, there were several similarities between the career of Lee Harvey Oswald and Thomas Arthur Vallee’s account of his own career:

* Both were former Marines.
* Both had served at Marine bases in Japan that hosted the U–2 spy plane: Oswald at Atsugi, Vallee at Camp Otsu.
* Both had been involved with anti–Castro Cubans: Oswald in New Orleans, Vallee at a training camp at Levittown on Long Island, New York.
* Both had recently started working at premises that overlooked the routes of presidential parades: Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street in Dallas, Vallee at IPP Litho–Plate at 625 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago.


625 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, overlooking the presidential parade.

There were two other curious coincidences:

* The tip–off to the FBI about the assassination plot in Chicago came from an informant identified only as ‘Lee’. In the first few weeks after the assassination, there were rumours that Lee Oswald had been a paid informant of the FBI.

* Thomas Vallee was arrested at 9:10am Chicago time, having been under constant surveillance since the previous day. Five minutes later, at 10:15 Washington time, President Kennedy’s press spokesman, Pierre Salinger, announced that the visit to Chicago had been cancelled. The decision to cancel the trip had presumably been made several minutes earlier. The timing has led some commentators to conclude that Vallee was allowed to remain on the streets until he was no longer required to perform his unwitting role as designated patsy.

(22 November 1963)



Vallee drove a 1962 Ford Falcon with the New York licence plate 31-10RF. After JFK's assassination, NBC news learned of Vallee's arrest on Nov 2nd in Chicago. Luke Christopher Hester, an NBC Chicago employee, asked his father in law, Hugh Larkin, a retired New York City police officer, to check on Vallee's licence plate. Larkin asked his old friends in the New York PD to do a check on the plate. They came back to Larkin saying the licence plate was "frozen" and "only the FBI could obtain the information." The registration for the licence plate on the car Thomas Arthur Vallee was driving at the time of his arrest was classified - restricted to US intelligence agencies.

(James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, chapter 5)

Hugh Larkin's daughter, Mary Larkin Ivino, was so curious about the car's license plate that she conducted her own investigation. She somehow managed to obtain the address for the license plate. It was a location on Long Island. She knew from her brother, who was a firefighter, that the fire department had a registry of addresses. At h er request, members of the fire department checked their registry for more information concerning the Long Island address for the license plate of the car Vallee had been driving at his arrest. "That address is a vacant lot." Whoever registered the license plate for the car had given an address that would frustrate any quest for further information.

(James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, footnotes, p. 434, paperback edition, 2010)

540 Who represented Justice For The Crew Of The Thresher?


Compare:
456 Draft of Liebeler report relating to Odio

Related:
11  Page 17 from Oswald's address book


                "Sir, I BEG of you, if you do visit Dallas and ride in an open car, PLEASE
        do not allow anyone of your loved ones to ride in an open car with you."

From New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Texas, via Mexico City around the same time that three men visited Sylvia Odio and her sister, one of whom was “Leon Oswald, an ex-Marine who could kill anyone, like the Secretary of the Navy.”

Around the same time, Edward Bray was visited by three men in suits who claimed to represent JFCOTT – Justice for the Crew of The Thresher, the nuclear sub that went down with all hands, ostensibly because of faulty hardware made by the Bendix corporation, for whom Bray worked. Like Odio’s visitors the JFCOTT visitors to Bray also threatened the President and Governor Connally, the former Secretary of the Navy. Bray even wrote to Connally to warn him of the threats. After the assassination, some people, like James Reston, Jr., son of the NY Times reporter, speculated that Oswald actually intended to shoot Connally rather than Kennedy.

(Bill Kelly, JFKCountercoup, 2019)


USS Thresher sank on April 10, 1963, killing all 129 people on board.

USS Thresher (SSN-593) was the lead nuclear-submarine attack submarine of her class and was commissioned on August 3, 1961, at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine. Following commissioning, she completed trials in the Atlantic and Caribbean areas testing her new technological systems and weapons. On April 10, 1963, following overhaul, Thresher began deep-diving tests, along with USS Skylark (ASR-20), about 220 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. As the tests proceeded, Skylark received garbled communications from her which eventually stopped. It became apparent she had sunk taking the lives of the 129 officers, crewmen, and civilian technicians. Thresher's remains were located about 8,400 feet below the surface on the sea floor by the bathyscaphe Trieste, aided by USS Mizar (AK-272) and other ships. After a review of evidence, the Court of Inquiry determined she had probably sunk due to a piping failure, subsequent loss of power and the inability to blow ballast tanks rapidly enough to avoid sinking.

(Naval History and Heritage Command)


"A plot is underway to assassinate you. As a former Secretary of the Navy you are well aware of the Submarine Thresher disaster and how the Bendix Corp. used fraudulent pressure depth curves on equipment designed and built by Bendix for submarines of the Thresher class.

"An organization, known as THE JUSTICE FOR THE CREW OF THE THRESHER is being formed. Former servicemen, with a grudge against the military, are being recruited. There are two groups of this organization, one in Dallas Texas, and one in Columbus, Ohio.

"Sir, I BEG of you, if you do visit Dallas and ride in an open car, PLEASE do not allow anyone of your loved ones to ride in an open car with you.

"IF A SNIPER'S bullett (sic), meant for you, was fired from a high-powered rifle by one of these disgruntled former servicemen struck one of your loved on instead of you, STOP and ask yourself, would I be able to carry this tragedy with me the balance of my life?"

(Letter from Edward F. Bray, Portland, Oregon, August 12, 1963)


Edward Bray's handwriting

The Bendix Aviation Corporation suffered financial losses during the Depression and [inventor, founder] Vincent Bendix declared personal bankruptcy. However, the firm experienced tremendous growth as a result of wartime production in the 1940’s. In 1960, Bendix Aviation changed its name to Bendix Corporation to include its other activities, such as automobiles, space, missiles, and energy controls.

(The History Museum)



In the 1950s, Bendix and its successors managed United States Atomic Energy Commission facilities in Kansas City, Missouri and Albuquerque, New Mexico. These facilities procured non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons. (...)

The company was renamed to Bendix Corporation in 1960.
During the 1960s the company made ground and airborne telecommunications systems for NASA. (...)

In February 2020, Bendix announced that it would be moving its headquarters from Elyria, Ohio to Avon, with an expected opening date for its new facility of November 2021.

(Wikipedia, retrieved, 9-14-22)