Foreknowledge and Forewarnings of the JFK Assassination

Here are yet more indications of foreknowledge of the assassination of President inside the United States compiled by an unnamed researcher. This list does not include the story of CIA agent Gary Underwood who tried to warn people before the event and who was killed himself on November 22, or the story of a top official of the W.R. Grace shipping company who also spoke out to alert others and was killed in the street in New York with a blunt object on the day of the assassination. There are others.

In addition to this, there is good evidence that the note written to the Dallas FBI agent Hosty by Lee Harvey Oswald weeks before the assassination was not a threat to the FBI, as claimed, but was destroyed by Hosty on orders of FBI SAC Shanklin because it warned that JFK would be killed in Dallas. Oswald seems to have been positioned near to the elements involved on the mechanical level either to infiltrate them or to frame him later.

Foreknowledge

A good many individuals appear to have known about the assassination in advance. Some of those with the information tired to warn JFK. Some were “removed” before they could garner very much public attention. On September 20, 1963, for example, Richard Case Nagell walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas. He fired two shots into the wall near the ceiling, walked back out to his car, and waited to be arrested. Subsequently, Nagell would claim he was a double (or triple) agent of U.S. and the KGB, that he knew Lee Harvey Oswald and was monitoring the JFK assassination plot which involved Cuban exiles, and that he had been ordered to kill Oswald to prevent the plot from being carried out. He also maintained that he had sent a registered letter to FBI Director Hoover, warning him of the plot.

During the summer of 1963, Christian David – a member of the French Connection network and the leader of the Corsican network in South America known as the Latin Connection – said that he was offered a contract by Antoine Guerini, the Corsican crime boss in Marseilles, France, to accept a contract to kill “a highly placed American politician,” whom Guerini called the “biggest vegetable” – i.e., JFK. The President is to be killed on U.S. territory. David said that he turned down the contract because it was too dangerous. David said that the contract was then accepted by Lucien Sarti, another Corsican drug trafficker and killer, and two other members of the Marseilles mob whom he refused to name. He described them as specialistes de tir – “sharpshooters.” [Christian David had also worked for the CIA.] The point here is that the “word on the street” regarding an upcoming attempt on Kennedy’s life was obviously beginning to surface and circulate in various circles.

On November 20, 1963, Lt. Francis Fruge of the Louisiana State Police received a phone call from Moosa Memorial Hospital in Eunice. A Mrs. Louise Guillory, the hospital administrator told him that there was an accident victim in the emergency ward. Guillory knew that Fruge worked the narcotics detail and she felt that the woman was under the influence of drugs.

When Fruge got to the hospital he encountered a middle-aged white female sitting down in the waiting room outside emergency. The woman identified herself to Fruge as Rose Cheramie. Eventually calmed by the sedative, and according to Fruge, quite lucid, she told him that she was en route from Florida to Dallas with two men who looked Cuban or Italian. The men told her that they were going to kill the president in Dallas in just a few days. Cheramie herself was not part of the plot but apparently the men were also part of a large dope ring with Rose since Cheramie’s function was as a courier of funds for heroin which was to be dropped off to her by a seaman coming into the port of Galveston. She was to pick up the money for the drugs from a man who was holding her child. It seemed a quite intricate dope ring since she was then to transport the heroin to Mexico. The two men were supposed to accompany her to Mexico but the whole transaction got short-circuited on Highway 190 near Eunice. In the confines of a seedy bar called the Silver Slipper Lounge, Cheramie’s two friends were met by a third party. Rose left with the two men she came with. But a short distance away from the bar, an argument apparently ensued. And although some have written that she was thrown out of the vehicle and hit by an oncoming car, according to Fruge, Rose said that the argument took place inside the Silver Slipper, and that the two men and the manager, Mac Manual, threw her out. While hitchhiking on the 190, she was hit by a car driven by one Frank Odom. It was Odom who then delivered her to Moosa. As Fruge so memorably recalled to Jonathan Blackmer of the HSCA, Cheramie summed up her itinerary in Dallas in the following manner: “She said she was going to, number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby, and to kill Kennedy.” (p. 9 of Fruge’s 4/18/78 deposition)

Cheramie repeated her prediction of the assassination. On November 22nd, several nurses were watching television with Cheramie. According to these witnesses, “…during the telecast moments before Kennedy was shot Rose Cheramie stated to them, ‘This is when it is going to happen’ and at that moment Kennedy was assassinated. The nurses, in turn, told others of Cheramie’s prognostication.” (Memo of Frank Meloche to Louis Ivon, 5/22/67. Although the Dallas motorcade was not broadcast live on the major networks, the nurses were likely referring to the spot reports that circulated through local channels in the vicinity of the trip. Of course, the assassination itself was reported on by network television almost immediately after it happened.) Further, according to a psychiatrist there, Dr. Victor Weiss, Rose “…told him that she knew both Ruby and Oswald and had seen them sitting together on occasions at Ruby’s club.” (Ibid., 3/13/67) In fact, Fruge later confirmed the fact that she had worked as a stripper for Ruby. (Louisiana State Police report of 4/4/67.)

On November 9, 1963, William Augustus Somersett, an informer for the FBI and the Miami Police tape-recorded, in his own apartment, a threat against JFK made by his boyhood friend, Joseph Milteer — a ranking member of several hate groups, including the National States Rights Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the American constitution Party and the White Citizens’ Council of Atlanta. Somersett informed his police contact about the conversation.

Somersett: Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him [JFK]?

Milteer: From an office building with a high-powered rifle. He knows he’s a marked man.

Somersett: They are really going to try to kill him?

Milteer: Oh, yeah, it is in the working …They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards….Just to throw the public off.

On November 17, 1963, FBI overnight code clerk William S. Walter, in New Orleans, maintained that he received an Airtel alert from FBI headquarters in Washington about “a threat to assassinate President Kennedy November 22-23” in Dallas “by a militant revolutionary group.” Instructions in the Teletype included contacting infiltrators in local racists hate groups. The original airtel and all copies disappeared shortly after the assassination. Word of the Teletype did not leak out until five years after the assassination. Upon receiving the Teletype (Walter said under oath), “I immediately contacted the special agent-in-charge who had the category of threats against the president and read him the teletype. He instructed me to call the agents that had responsibility and informants, and as I called them, I noted the time and the names of the agents that I called. That all took place in the early morning hours of the 17th of November.” Ray & Mary La Fontaine maintain that this Airtel is the result of LHO’s pre assassination interview with the Dallas FBI.

“URGENT: 1:45 AM EST 11-17-63 HLF 1 PAGE

TO ALL SACS:
FROM: DIRECTOR

THREAT TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT KENNEDY IN DALLAS TEXAS NOVEMBER 22 DASH TWENTY THREE NINETEEN SIXTY THREE. MISC INFORMATION CONCERNING. INFORMATION HAS BEEN RECEIVED BY THE BUREAUS BUREAU HAS DETERMINED THAT A MILITANT REVOLUTIONARY GROUP MAY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT KENNEDY ON HIS PROPOSED TRIP TO DALLAS TEXAS NOVEMBER TWENTY TWO DASH TWENTY THREE NINETEEN SIXTY THREE. ALL RECEIVING OFFICES SHOULD IMMEDIATELY CONTACT ALL CIS, PCIS LOGICAL RACE AND HATE GROUP INFORMANTS AND DETERMINE IF ANY BASIS FOR THREAT. BUREAU SHOULD BE KEPT ADVISED OF ALL DEVELOPMENTS BY TELETYPE. OTHER OFFICES HAVE BEEN ADVISED. END AND ACK PLS.”

According to Gerry Patrick Hemming, “The week before the assassination, Felipe Vidal Santiago told my group that some people had approached him to go to a big meeting in Dallas that week.” Hemming says: “We warned him and some other people not to go, that something funny was up. I’d heard of other meetings, where the conversation got steered around toward hitting JFK instead of Fidel. I’m talking about some friends of [Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio] Somoza, and about some people in Dallas. It’s hard to say exactly who this select group of Cuban exiles was really working for. For a while they were reporting to Bill Harvey’s ex-CIA FBI guys. Some were reporting back to Hoover, or the new DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]. There was a third force – pretty much outside CIA channels, outside our own private operation down in the Keys – that was doing all kinds of shit, and had been all through ‘63.”

On October 22, 1963, Army code breaker Pfc. Eugene B. Dinkin (serial number RA 76710292) wrote Robert Kennedy from France about a military plot against JFK. In a later civil action law suit, Dinkin wrote: “I did offer in this letter a warning that an attempt to assassinate President Kennedy would occur on November 28th, 1963; that if it were to succeed, blame would then be placed upon a Communist or Negro, who would be designated the assassin; and believing that the conspiracy was being engineered by elements of the military, I did speculate that a military coup might ensue. I did request of the Attorney General that he dispatch a representative of the Justice Department to Metz, France to discuss this warning.”

On November 13, 1963, (Metz, France) Dinkin was taken into custody by Army officials and hospitalized in a closed psychiatric ward. He was kept virtually incommunicado for approximately one week. Dinkin had gone AWOL weeks before and alerted various embassies across Europe about a conspiracy to assassinate the president involving the military and perhaps an “ultra right economic group.” Dinkin eventually ended up in Walter Reed Army Hospital for four months — where it appears that a “cover story” may have been induced to obfuscate whatever legitimate advance knowledge he possessed. Dinkin said that he believed that the psychiatric evaluation given him by the Army psychiatrist was, in fact, an attempt on their part to cover up the military plot which he had attempted to expose. There is evidence that the White House, the CIA and the Attorney General’s office were all in possession of Dinkin’s explicit and detailed warning prior to JFK’s assassination.

One day before the assassination, Wayne January was working side by side with a Cuban born pilot who was to fly a newly purchased DC-3 out of The Redbird Airfield (Dallas) the next day. Since early that morning, January had been helping the pilot complete a preflight inspection in order for the plane. The pilot became uneasy and finally turned to January and said: “They are going to kill your president.” January eventually told researcher Matthew Smith that the Cuban pilots went on to say: “I was a mercenary pilot, hired by the CIA.” The pilot continued: “They are not only going to kill the President. They are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy that gets in their position.” When January expressed his skepticism, the pilot replied “You will see.” The conversation was dropped for a while, then the pilot broke the silence: “They want Robert Kennedy real bad.” When January asked why, the pilot replied “Never mind. You don’t need to know. Let’s get this job done, time is running out. My boss wants to return to Florida; he thought we would be through today.”

These are only a few of the examples of the extent of the prior knowledge. The fact that so many organizations and individuals obviously possessed advance knowledge of the assassination makes it less remarkable to discover that Castro also knew of the plans as well. He had, after all, a remarkable intelligence operation that had already infiltrated many aspects of the CIA’s MONGOOSE operation among other secret programs in the U.S..

On September 7, 1963, Fidel Castro buttonholed Daniel Harker, a reporter for the Associated Press, and gave him a three-hour interview in Havana. On the surface, Castro’s purpose seemed to be to let the U.S. know that he would “answer in kind” any attempt to murder Cuban leaders. “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”

Considering Castro’s foreknowledge of the assassination plans, this statement might not have been a threat at all, but rather a warning to JFK about impending danger.

In conclusion, a Gallup poll taken two weeks after the assassination found 52 per cent of Americans believed there had been a conspiracy to kill the president. By 1993 CBS News poll found 89 per cent of the population believed in the conspiracy and 81 per cent believed there was an official cover-up.

Over the years, dozens of official and semi-official sources have come forward with their own evidence. “I no longer feel we simply had no credible evidence or reliable evidence in proof of a conspiracy,” former Warren commissioner John J. McCloy admitted in 1978. William Sullivan, Domestic Intelligence Chief, also doubted the findings saying, “there were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close.” And Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry later stated he believed that two gunmen were involved. “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle,” Curry said in 1969. Kennedy’s own aid Kenneth O’Donnell, who rode in the motorcade immediately behind the president, told House Speaker Tip O’Neil that he was pressured by the FBI not to say what he strongly believed: that gunfire came from in front of the motorcade.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1978 that there had “probably” been a conspiracy in Dealey Plaza.