Three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, another effort was aborted in Chicago.
Abraham Bolden, the first black man appointed to the President’s Secret Service detail, stumbled upon a plot to kill Kennedy that had evidently fallen apart at the last minute.
As this ABC report notes:
Kennedy was due to arrive in Chicago the morning of Saturday, November 2 to attend the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier Field and ride in a parade. Newspapers had even printed JFK’s detailed travel plan from O’Hare to the Loop.
Although police were preparing to line the motorcade route, Secret Service officials in Chicago were deeply troubled about the visit because of two secret threats.
Right-wing radical and Kennedy denouncer Thomas Vallee, had arranged to be off work for JFK’s visit, Vallee, an expert marksman, was arrested with an M1 rifle, a handgun and 3,000 rounds of ammo. But then there was the phone call to federal agents from a motel manager concerning what was she saw in a room rented by two Cuban nationals.
“Had seen lying on the bed several automatic rifles with telescopic sights, with an outline of the route that President Kennedy was supposed to take in Chicago that would bring him past that building,” said former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.
Chicagoan Bolden, now 72, was a young agent in 1963. After a few years as an Illinois state trooper, Bolden had joined he Secret Service and was invited by President Kennedy onto the prestigious White House detail – the first black agent ever assigned to protect a president.
Bolden recalled how agents bungled surveillance of those two suspected Cuban hitmen. They disappeared and were never even identified.
“No one was sent to the room to fingerprint it or get an I.D. The case was lost and that was the end of it,” Bolden said.
Cuban nationals, of course, could easily describe anti-Castro Cubans, many of whom were on the CIA’s payroll.
So why was this story not trumpted all over the news, especially after Dallas? As Gary Reese of the Florida Insider explains:
More disturbing was the fact that Bolden, a black man who had been hand picked by Kennedy to serve in a prestigious and virtually all-white profession, apparently attempted to give the information to members of the Warren Commission formed to investigate the Kennedy assassination. Not only, according to Bolden, did they refuse to take the information, he was at about the same time accused of soliciting a bribe from a counterfeiter and sent to jail for six years. According to the interview, conducted by the ABC affiliate in Chicago, Bolden contends that this was a set-up to silence him.
Bolden’s then-accuser recently recanted his charges.
“It would truly be ironic if the first African-American to serve on a Presidential security detail was in fact a hero whose race and information made him an easy mark to put down and lock away back in those days” said an individual closely related to the civil rights movement in the 1960s who preferred not to be identified.
Bolden would hardly have been the first to be set up and then silenced. A CIA man named Roland “Bud” Culligan claimed he was set up on a phony bad check charge to keep him quiet about assassinations he had performed for the CIA, including, according to Culligan, the assassination of UN secretary Dag Hammarskjold. Culligan claimed that, on CIA orders, he shot Hammarskjold’s plane from the sky. See my article “Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold” which was referenced in Covert Action Quarterly, for more information on this incident. Culligan also claimed one of his jobs was to kill the assassins of President Kennedy.
The Church committee took a serious interest in Culligan’s charges. But few outside the research community have shown any interest in pursuing the Bolden story. Why? Because it removes the fig leaf offered by the Oswald myth and puts the Dallas action in a broader context of multiple plots.
