Legacy of Secrecy (18 page)

the last minute would surely raise questions they couldn’t answer. JFK

was set to give his important speech that night in Miami, which would

include the important lines of assurance for Commander Almeida. How

could JFK ask Almeida to risk his life to stage a coup if word leaked that

JFK had been too afraid to travel in his own motorcade?

JFK’s recent activities had been orchestrated to send a show of strength

76

LEGACY OF SECRECY

to Almeida and his allies. The previous day, Florida newspapers fea-

tured major front-page coverage of JFK viewing the launch of a Polaris

missile from a submarine. In Tampa, JFK was scheduled to have a widely

publicized private meeting with the head of Strike Force Command

(now Central Command) and other military brass, some brought in from

Washington.5 Coupled with the special lines in JFK’s speech, all this was

designed to reassure Almeida that JFK would back him and the coup all

the way, even with US military force.

However, JFK’s plan to reassure Almeida was at risk after the Secret

Service found “that the threat on Nov. 18, 1963, was posed by a mobile,

unidentified rifleman shooting from a window in a tall building with a

high-power rifle fitted with scope.”6 Tampa’s Chief of Police, J. P. Mul-

lins, confirmed to us that at least one other individual was part of that

plot. Secret Service Agent Sam Kinney said he learned later that “orga-

nized crime” was behind the threat, and a high Florida law enforce-

ment official later confirmed that Tampa mob boss Santo Trafficante was

involved. But on the day of the motorcade, that information had not yet

surfaced. Tampa was home to a large Cuban exile community, some of

whom were angry about JFK’s apparent crackdown on all anti-Castro

Cuban exile groups in the US. (His support for a handful of exile groups

for the coup plan was covert, and rare news reports hinting at it were

quickly squelched.) The anger Cuban exiles felt toward JFK was even

more pronounced in Miami, where some Bay of Pigs veterans threatened

to protest outside his speech. However, Tampa was different from Miami

in that some exiles in Tampa still supported Fidel Castro; there was even

a Tampa chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the

same organization Lee Harvey Oswald had joined earlier that year.

Before JFK’s Tampa motorcade, officials issued a lookout regarding

the assassination plot, and its description of a potential assassin matched

Oswald much better than the first descriptions issued after JFK’s murder

in Dallas. (An unconfirmed report later placed Oswald in Tampa the

day before JFK’s motorcade.) Yet the Tampa description also fit another

individual who was named as a suspect in JFK’s assassination in secret

FBI and CIA documents, though he was never mentioned in the Warren

Report, and information about him was withheld from the HSCA.7

By November 1963, Gilberto Policarpo Lopez had eighteen paral-

lels with Lee Harvey Oswald, according to declassified government

files. For example, both were about the same age, and both had left

their wives a few months earlier, around the time each man moved to

a new city. Both were former defectors with a Russian connection in

their background. Each had returned to the United States in 1962 from

a communist country. Both men had an unusual involvement with the

small pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1963, after it became

the subject of Congressional hearings and newspaper accounts. Both got

into fistfights over seemingly pro-Castro statements, but neither joined

the Communist Party or regularly associated with American commu-

nists. Both men were persons of interest to Naval Intelligence in 1963,

and both were alleged by officials to be informants for a US agency. Both

men attempted to get into Cuba in the fall of 1963 by going to Texas,

crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo, and proceeding to Mexico City for

the air connection to Cuba. (Since travel between the US and Cuba was

restricted, travelers from the US often went to Havana via Mexico City,

a route undercover US intelligence agents also used.)8 Both Oswald and

Lopez went at least part of the way by car, though neither man owned

a car or had a driver’s license. Each was under CIA surveillance for at

least part of his Mexico trip. And by November 1963, each had a job in

the vicinity of an upcoming JFK motorcade.9

FBI and government files confirm that Lopez left Tampa shortly after

JFK’s motorcade and went to Texas, where an unconfirmed newspaper

account places him in Dallas on November 22, 1963. But his where-

abouts weren’t known at the time, at least not by Bobby Kennedy; his

movements were discovered only later, by the FBI, CIA, and several

journalists.

Prior to JFK’s Tampa motorcade, Bobby and JFK had been told about

a Florida threat made by white supremacist Joseph Milteer, which had

been picked up by a wired Miami police informant. Milteer was from

the small town of Quitman in South Georgia, but he traveled extensively

and was in touch with the most violent racist groups active in 1963.10

He had inherited $200,000 from his father (over a million in today’s

dollars), and his determination to kill JFK was motivated by his racist

ideology, not by money. Because Milteer was not arrested at the time of

JFK’s Tampa motorcade, before Dallas, or even afterward—and because

Hoover withheld crucial information from Georgia FBI agents investi-

gating Milteer—the white supremacist would continue his deadly pur-

suits. This would allow Milteer to play a crucial role in the assassination

of Martin Luther King in 1968, which is revealed for the first time later

in the book.

Undercover Miami police tapes recorded Joseph Milteer talking

about JFK’s murder less than two weeks prior to JFK’s assassination in

Dallas. Milteer told Miami police informant William Somersett about a

78

LEGACY OF SECRECY

plan “to assassinate the President with a high-powered rifle from a tall

building.” On the police tape from November 9, 1963, Milteer accurately

states that authorities “will pick up somebody within hours afterwards

. . . just to throw the public off.” Milteer said the assassination had been

arranged in such a way as to “drop the responsibility right into the laps

of the Communists . . . or Castro.”11

Somersett also told authorities that Milteer had indicated “this con-

spiracy originated in New Orleans, and probably some in Miami.” Milt-

eer said “there was a lot of money” involved in the plot, not only from

far-right extremists, “but from men who could afford to contribute,”

though the only one he mentioned by name was a Louisiana political

boss who was tied to both Carlos Marcello and Guy Banister. The Miami

police told the Secret Service and FBI about the tapes and plot. The FBI

assigned Atlanta agent Don Adams to the case on November 13, and he

went to Quitman, where Milteer lived, to quietly investigate him. How-

ever, Adams stated to us that his FBI superiors never told him about the

police tapes of Milteer or about the recent threat against JFK in Tampa.

While parts of the Milteer story and the audiotapes have been known

to investigators for decades, it was only in 2006 that Dr. Michael L.

Kurtz published the accounts of reliable witnesses who could tie Milt-

eer directly to Guy Banister and other associates of Carlos Marcello. He

writes that on one occasion, a noted architect saw Banister and “Milteer

conversing with some of Marcello’s people in the French Quarter.” Aside

from sharing racist views and hatred of the Kennedys, Banister, Milteer,

and Marcello also shared a connection to the illegal arms trade, since in

1963 the major buyers of illegal weapons from organized crime included

Cuban exile groups and white supremacists. Dr. Kurtz also noted that

“Milteer had close connections to Santos Trafficante,” since Milteer was

also involved in “illegal arms and narcotics trafficking.”12

JFK had much to worry about during his November 18 motorcade

in Tampa, and Police Chief Mullins and other officials were especially

concerned about Tampa’s tallest building, the Floridan Hotel, which

overlooked a hard left turn JFK’s motorcade would have to take. The

red-brick Floridan looks similar to the Texas School Book Depository,

only much taller and with more windows; almost a hundred had a clear

view of JFK’s motorcade. The hotel was full that day, and impossible

to secure. In 1963, one could easily register under a false name—at that

time, many travelers paid with cash—and every guest-room window in

the Floridan could be opened. The hotel was just one short block away

from the intersection where JFK’s limo would have to come to almost a

full stop to make its turn. For a sniper perched in one of the hotel win-

dows, sitting back in the shadows, assassinating the President would

have been easy. Chief Mullins and the Secret Service didn’t know if the

two suspects at large were Cuban agents (the same shadowy Cuban,

Miguel Cases Saez, who was reported near Chicago just before JFK’s

motorcade there, had also been reported in Florida), disgruntled Cuban

exiles, white-supremacist allies of Milteer, or someone else—hence their

advice to JFK to cancel his entire motorcade.

But JFK disregarded their warnings, and insisted on going ahead. Just

as in Chicago, a press blackout about the threat was informally ordered.

The “bubble top” for JFK’s limo wasn’t used—it wasn’t bulletproof

anyway, and using it would send the wrong message to Commander

Almeida. The Lincoln in which JFK rode in Tampa was the same one he

would later use in Dallas. Jackie wasn’t with him on the Tampa trip, so

only JFK’s life was at risk. According to Chief Mullins and other officials,

when JFK was backstage and away from the press, he looked stressed

and tired, though before the public he appeared to be the smiling, con-

fident JFK the public knew. The press blackout about the threat was still

holding when JFK began his motorcade, but there was no way to know if

a media outlet might break the story while he was in his limo or giving

a speech. Photos show that during part of the motorcade, JFK actually

stood up in the car; we may never know whether he did so because of

his ongoing back problems, or because it was his way of showing he

wasn’t afraid, even if word of the threat did leak to the public.

JFK gave several speeches in Tampa, including one at the Inter-

national Inn. (Four days later, Santo Trafficante would publicly toast

JFK’s death at the same hotel, just hours after the assassination.) On

the evening of November 18, the President flew to Miami and gave his

most important speech, with lines directed at Commander Almeida and

his allies in Cuba. The following day, several newspapers trumpeted

those lines almost too clearly: The
Dallas Times Herald
said, “Kennedy

Virtually Invites Cuban Coup”; the
Miami Herald
said, “Kennedy Invites

Coup”; and the
New York Times
proclaimed, “Kennedy says US will

aid Cuba once Cuban sovereignty is restored under a non-communist

government.”13

After JFK returned to Washington, JFK expressed his relief at surviv-

ing the trip to his close aide, David Powers. According to Kennedy biog-

rapher Ralph Martin, JFK told Powers: “Thank God nobody wanted to

kill me today!” JFK explained an assassination “would be tried by some-

one with a high-power rifle and a telescopic sight during a downtown

80

LEGACY OF SECRECY

parade when there would be so much noise and confetti that nobody

would even be able to point and say, ‘It came from that window.’”14

After JFK’s Tampa motorcade and Miami speech, JFK and Bobby

could breathe a sigh of relief as they looked ahead to JFK’s upcoming

trip to Texas. They knew of no active threat in Texas, as there had been

in Chicago and Tampa. Moreover, Dallas didn’t have a large Cuban exile

population to worry about, as did Tampa and Chicago.

JFK and Bobby would have been even more concerned had they

known that the day before JFK’s Tampa speech, he had been stalked by

two Cuban exiles who hated him. Bitter Bay of Pigs veterans Alberto

Fowler and Felipe Rivero had rented a house next to JFK’s compound

in Palm Beach, where the President was staying before his Tampa

motorcade. While Fowler later wrote that their only interest was

in playing loud music to annoy JFK, the facts suggest otherwise.

Rivero was a leader in a Cuban exile group getting major funding from

Chicago Mafia allies of Trafficante and Marcello, and Fowler would

make a provocative call to Bobby’s exile aide Harry Williams just hours

after JFK was shot.15

Why did Trafficante call off the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa? Accord-

ing to our source, who was high in Florida law enforcement, Trafficante’s

man in the Tampa Police Department, Sgt. Jack de la Llana, “was in