Twenty-three days before the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the FBI offices in Dallas and delivered a handwritten note for agent James Hosty. After JFK’s murder, Hosty was ordered to destroy this note and it took many years to uncover what that note might have said and why it had to be destroyed immediately after the assassination. The official story given by Hosty was it contained “some sort of threat,” but that later changed to the more ludicrous: “stay away from my wife.”
In fact, the note most likely claimed that a four-man assassination team had assembled in Chicago for the purpose of assassinating JFK on his way to Soldier Field for the annual Army-Air Force football game, an assassination scheduled to take place on November 2.
We only know all this because a Chicago-based secret service agent named Abraham Bolden was asked to investigate the allegation and two men were placed under surveillance and soon picked up later that day and brought to the Secret Service offices in Chicago, and then mysteriously released without being conclusively identified for the record. One of these suspects could have been John Roselli, or maybe he was one of the guys not picked up, but it’s clear the two suspects were spooks just from the way the investigation unfolded without arrest or noticeable investigative paperwork. Bolden only knew that the tip had come from an FBI informant named “Lee.” Bolden would later turn whistleblower and pay the career-ending price.
By strange coincidence, another chance encounter had put the assassination mission in jeopardy, as the patsy had inadvertently prematurely come under investigation. And that patsy bore an amazing resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald. His name was Thomas Arthur Vallee and he’d been overheard making threats against JFK at a diner, where he was confronted by an undercover officer who reported the incident to Chicago Secret Service.
Two Chicago police officers were sent to investigate Vallee, and they both ended up rising rapidly through the ranks: Daniel Groth and Peter Schurla. Right around the time JFK cancelled his Chicago trip (just an hour before he was due to take off), Groth and Schurla went to see Vallee.
He told them he’d been assigned to a U2 base in Japan (just like Oswald) and had a small arsenal and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He was a devoted member of the John Birch Society, which means he likely believed JFK was a communist agent bent on destruction of the United States.
Photos of his vehicle revealed that Vallee had a license plate that was protected by national security. He was also a certified mental patient with a metal plate in his head and a history of emotional breakdowns.
Since there was also another plot based in Tampa one wonders if an ex-Marine from a U2 base in Japan was also being moved into a tall office building overlooking a parade route. Supposedly that shooter was positioned in the Floridan Hotel, then the tallest building in Tampa, while a Cuban named Gilberto Lopez was being set-up to take the fall. The locations of Chicago, Tampa and Dallas are telling because that’s where Dulles and Angleton felt they had the most control over the situation.
But perhaps the most telling detail is the two cops sent to interview Vallee were later sent to assassinate Fred Hampton, the most respected activist leader in Chicago, and someone who was railing against the recently-created Weather Underground that was seeking a violent revolution in America. The Weathermen seized upon Hampton’s assassination as the reason everyone needed to take up arms and especially urged people to shoot cops and soldiers.
Shortly after 1963, Vallee moved to Indianapolis. A few years later he moved to Columbus. In the fall of 1966, the Secret Service conducted its first interrogation of Vallee. Although the serial numbers had never been checked on the original weapons found on him in Chicago, the Secret Service allegedly did check the serial numbers on his newly acquired rifles. Afterwards, Vallee relocated to Houston. He was tracked there by Edwin Black of the Chicago Independent.