Libra - Don Delillo [169]
Nicholas Branch has a sound tape made in Miami nine days before the President was due to appear in that city. The conversation on the tape was secretly recorded by one William Somersett, a police informer. The man talking to Somersett is Joseph A. Milteer, a member of the Congress of Freedom and the White Citizens Council of Atlanta.
SOMERSETT I think Kennedy’s coming here on the eighteenth, something like that, to make some kind of speech.
MILTEER You can bet your bottom dollars he’s going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There’s so many of them here.
SOMERSETT Yeah, well, he’ll have a thousand bodyguards. Don’t worry about that.
MILTEER The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.
SOMERSETT Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?
MILTEER From an office building with a high-powered rifle. He knows he’s a marked man.
SOMERSETT They’re really going to try to kill him?
MILTEER Oh, yeah, it’s in the working. There ain’t any countdown on it. We’ve just got to be sitting on go. Countdown, they can move in on you, and on go they can’t. Countdown is all right for a slow prepared operation. But in an emergency operation, you’ve got to be sitting on go.
SOMERSETT Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we’ve got to know where we’re at. Because you know that’ll be a real shake if they do that.
MILTEER They wouldn’t leave any stone unturned. No way. They will pick somebody up within hours afterwards if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off.
When the Secret Service heard the tape, they prevailed upon the President’s men to cancel the motorcade scheduled for Miami. Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the airport to a downtown hotel, where he spoke to a group of journalists.
Branch has two theories about this incident.
One, T. J. Mackey leaked news of the plot either directly to Milteer or to people in his circle. It’s a fact that Mackey had connections in the intelligence unit of the Miami police and it’s possible that he knew Milteer was being monitored. Milteer, a sixty-two-year-old Georgian, was known to be involved in violent resistance to integration.
Two, it was Guy Banister who told Milteer about the Miami plot and unwittingly ruined the operation.
(The Secret Service did not forward details of the taped conversation to agents responsible for the President’s safety in Dallas. The FBI questioned Milteer superficially after the assassination.)
Branch also has a theory about the Oswald doubles who were active for almost two months, mainly in and around Dallas but also in other Texas cities. He thinks Mackey devised the scheme principally to occupy Alpha 66, to get them so deeply entrenched in rigid arrangements and setups that they wouldn’t be able to adjust when the Miami façade folded over in the first breeze. Joseph Milteer had spoken of the difference between countdown and go. Mackey wanted to be sure that Alpha was stuck in countdown. He would be sitting on go.
The operation was crude. Someone looking like Oswald walks into an auto showroom, says his name is Lee Oswald, says he will soon be coming into money, test-drives a Comet at high speeds and makes a remark about going back to Russia. Someone who says his name is Oswald goes to a gunsmith and has a telescopic sight mounted on his rifle. Someone looking like Oswald goes to a rifle range half a dozen times in a thirteen-day period and makes a point of shooting at other people’s targets.
All of these incidents took place at times when the real Oswald was known to be elsewhere.
To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, “Lee H. Oswald” seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history. A photograph taken by hidden CIA cameras of a man walking past the Soviet embassy in Mexico City bears the identifying tag “Lee H. Oswald.” Oswald was in Mexico City at the time but the man in the picture is someone else—broad-chested, with a full face and cropped hair, in his late thirties or early forties. Another form of double. It