Two FBI Agents Come Clean on JFK Assassination

Two FBI Agents Come Clean on JFK Assassination 

THE FBI & the Assassination of President Kennedy

Unlike the Secret Service, whose director Chief Rowley thought it unwise to reprimand any of the Secret Service agents over lapses during the assassination, many FBI agents were reprimanded for a variety of reasons.

Now, nearly a half-century later, we have the reports and confessions of a number of agents who not only recognize there were plots and a conspiracy behind what happened at Dealey Plaza, but offer modus operandi and legitimate suspects who were known at the time, but officially covered up.

“From An Office with A High Powered Rifle” – A Report To The Public From An FBI Agent Involved In The Official JFK Assassination Investigation (Trinday, 2012), is former FBI agent Don Adams’ story of his personal investigation of Joseph A. Milteer, a right-wing fanatic who was caught on an informant’s tape saying President Kennedy would be killed “from an office with a high powered rife,” a threat that was kept from Milteer when he was ordered to locate and interrogate Milteer.

Just as FBI agents were kept from informing other agencies of information they collected on those who would become 9/11 hijackers, Don Adams was shocked to learn, after the JFK Act forced the release of many assassination records, that he was kept in the dark at the time he was investigating the assassination. It was only years later that he learned that the man whose case he was assigned had been recorded on tape predicting the murder and how it would be accomplished by a Florida police informant, that his suspect was photographed in Dallas on the day of the assassination, and he later bragged that he was there.

Despite the fact that an FBI document falsely claims that Milteer was at home in George at the time of the assassination, Adams knows he wasn’t because Adams was at Milteer’s house that day looking for him. When Milteer finally arrived at his girlfriend’s home a week later, Adams took him into custody, but was continually frustrated by other FBI agent’s attempts to cover their ass. Adams wasn’t even aware of the extent of the cover-up until he was shown some of the record released under the JFK Act.

When finally shown the transcript of the police informant’s conversation with Milteer, Adams was shocked to read that Milteer not only said the assassination would be accomplished “from an office with a high powered rifle,” but that “they will pick up somebody within hours afterwards…just to throw the public off.”

While working for the FBI in Ohio, Adams became familiar with Leo “Lips” Moceri, who Chauncey Holt, a self-professed tramp, con artists and syndicate accountant first mentioned as being in Dallas at the time of the assassination. While Moceri later disappeared, Adams says that in 1976 he located Moceri’s car in hotel parking lot, and he is sure Moceri is dead because his clothes and golf clubs were covered with blood.

I can identify with Don Adams, and his frustrations, as we are both sons of police detectives. I can understand his desire to make it in the FBI on his own without the benefit of his father’s friendship with Cartha DeLoach, a high ranking FBI official whose name is cc’d on nearly every FBI document related to the assassination.

Like my father, a Camden, NJ detective, Adams had the highest regard for the FBI and was proud he was an agent, serving “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” until he was convinced otherwise by the real evidence, and sadly learned that justice was never served, at least in the case of JFK.

My father had a similar high regard and opinion of the FBI, until a new agent was assigned to the Camden office and he was asked to show him the lay of the land. My dad later told me that after giving the new agent a tour of the high crime areas of the city, he took him out to Garden State Race Track where he pointed out a few organized crime characters and bookies. A few weeks later, one of the bookies complained that the new FBI guy was shaking him down for hundreds of dollars a week, thus changing my dad’s opinion of the FBI.

Those involved in such organized crime operations know who the bad cops are, the ones that will take a bribe, and they call them the “right coppers,” as opposed to the “wrong coppers,” or good cops who won’t take a bribe. Don Adams was a good FBI agent and to the criminals, a “wrong copper,” but he didn’t know who the bad FBI agents were when was working with them, and only later, belatedly figured them out.

High on Adams’ list today is J. Edgar Hoover himself, of whom he says, “If one looks clearly at the entire window concerning the assassination and asks what one major player could influence the investigation, the answer would have to be J. Edgar Hoover. I do not make that powerful statement lightly. Nonetheless, I have come to believe that it was the actions of the director of the FBI that facilitated the cover-up.”

After serving in the backwaters of Georgia, where he was handed the Milteer case, until it was covered up, Don Adams was assigned to the Dallas FBI office, where he had the opportunity to meet some of the other agents involved in the “investigation” of the president’s murder, including J. Gordon Shanklin and Robert Gemberling.

Their names are well known to JFK assassination researchers since Shanklin was in charge of the Dallas FBI office and he assigned Gemberling to investigate all the leads that came in after the assassination. After they both retired, Gemberling took exception to an interview Adams gave to a local Ohio newspaper, going on the record against the lone gunman theory promoted by Gemberling. Both men exchanged long letters. Then Adams attempted to straighten out some of the misconceptions Gemberling flouted in an article in the (Nov. 2003) issue of Grapevine, the official publication of retired FBI agents. But the editor would not publish Adam’s rebuttal.

“I knew that nothing would change his beliefs,” Adams writes, “not even evidence that should have at least made him question the veracity of his investigation. I have come to believe that Gemberling could not be dissuaded because he was following LBJ and FBI Director Hoover’s directive that Oswald had to be the shooter. Gemberling wrote of the outstanding work done by the FBI agents in this investigation and how proud he was of their work. But that work was tainted by corruption from above….There are too many witness statements from too many different people that contradicts the official findings.”

While the editors of the official FBI publication wouldn’t publish Don Adams rebuttal of the official findings and conclusions, Kris Millegan, publisher at TrinDay has no such reservations. Millegan gets personally involved in each book he publishes, and notes that, “There is much to learn from Adams’ story: connivance, deceit, and distraction by federal officials both before and after the assassination to deflect inquiry from its natural course and affect its outcome. And there is something there.” 

There certainly is something there. Adams himself concludes, “As the 50^th anniversary of this great tragedy approaches, it is time to begin again. Americans and people around the world have the right to know as much of the truth as can be learned.” 

M. WESLEY SWEARINGEN

M. Wesley Swearingen, a 25 year veteran of the FBI had to self-publish his own book, “To Kill A President” – Finally – An Ex-FBI Agent rips aside the Veil of secrecy that Killed JFK.

Swearingen, who faithfully served the bureau for a quarter of a century, eventually “came clean” and in an earlier book, “FBI SECRETS – An Agent’s Expose,” (South End Press, Boston) reported on FBI “corruption and wrongdoing,” including “black bag jobs” - breaking and entering private offices and residences to conduct illegal searchers, and COINTELPRO, the counter-intelligence program that targeted suspects J. Edgar Hoover thought subversive.

Swearingen served in the Chicago FBI office, where Guy Bannister had been the Special Agent In Charge before he ran Lee Harvey Oswald as an agent provocateur in New Orleans.

Chicago is where Swearingen worked closely with William F. Roemer, Jr., a big blow-hard whose book “Roemer: Man Against the Mob,” falsely portrays how he gave the Chicago mob a hard time, when he actually protected their operations, in league with the CIA, to plot the assassination of Fidel Castro and partake in the conspiracy that led to the death of JFK. 

When I read in Roemer’s book how he tapped the phones and the cocktail conversations of Sam Giancana, John Rosselli and the crooked cop Richard Cain and others, I realized he was full of it, and Swearingen confirms it.

Swearingen had an informant, an anti-Castro Cuban he calls “Ramon,” who was trained by the CIA at JM/WAVE who told him all about the Chicago mob’s connections to the Cubans, to the CIA and their plans for the Bay of Pigs and to kill Castro and Kennedy.

Cain was shot in the face with a shotgun by a masked gunman in Rose’s Sandwich Shop in Chicago on December 20, 1973, Giancana was killed, shot in the back of the head a few days before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, and Rosselli shortly after he testified, turned up in pieces stuffed in a 50 gallon oil drum floating in the Florida bay.

Among the characters in Swearingen’s book are Judith Campbell Exner, girlfriend of Frank Sinatra, JFK and Sam Giancana, who was questioned by the FBI in Swearingen’s apartment, Oliver “Buck” Revell, another FBI official who is also exposed as a blow-hard, and William Sullivan, Hoover’s assistant who was killed in 1978 in a hunting accident.

While there isn’t much documentary evidence to support his version of events, like Don Adams documents published in the appendix of his book, Swearingen’s story rings true, and fits all the facts of the case as I know them.