[PRB]

a personal friend who I had worked with when I was in the Organized Crime Section. I found him to be a dedicated and capable attorney and expert on organized crime law. But Blakey had decided that the FBI and Warren Commission were wrong in finding that Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy. He based his belief that there was a forth shot fired from the grassy knoll of the Texas Book Depository and therefore there had to be a second assassin and a conspiracy. When the Committee on Assassination’s final report came out I had been out of FBI Headquarters as SAC of the Oklahoma Division and promoted back to FBIHQ as the Assistant Director in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division. Judge William Webster was now the Director and I advised him to seek an outside of the Bureau review of the Committee’s findings of a forth shot. I strongly believed that the Committee’s findings were in error, but was convinced that only an outside organization with impeccable credentials could settle the dispute between the FBI’s technical acoustics experts and the experts hired by the Committee. Webster and the Attorney General agreed with me and the AG asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a totally independent review and analysis of the sounds recorded at the scene and time of the assassination. The National Academy of Science’s report agreed with the findings of the FBI’s Technical Services Division that the first three sounds were gunshots from the vicinity of the Texas Book Depository building and the fourth sound was a motorcycle backfire from at least two blocks away and at a time when the President’s motorcade had already gone into the railroad underpass in route to Parkland Hospital. That finding took away the House Committee’s only “evidence” of a conspiracy and they had already concluded that Oswald was the shooter from the 6th floor of the Book Depository.
One of the frequent criticisms of the FBI Investigation and the WC was that both had only focused on Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin of President Kennedy. The facts are very different; as of April of 1965 the FBI had submitted 18 reports containing 6,378 pages of investigative information on Oswald and all of his activities and alleged connections, but the investigation didn’t stop there, As of August 1965 the FBI had submitted 13 reports containing 3,070 pages on the investigation of other possible suspects including the Mafia, Cuba, the Soviet Union, corrupt politicians and big business interests. All of these reports went to the Warren Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.
In May of 1991 after the conclusion of the first Iraqi War (Desert Strom) I had been in Washington for 12 years and for 6 of those years I had direction and oversight responsibility for all FBI investigative and intelligence operations and programs. I was tired of Washington and all of its bickering and hypocrisy, especially from the national news media and the badly dysfunctional Congress. I was eligible to retire but I still had the urge to serve my country and the drive to do so. I proposed to FBI Director Bill Sessions and Attorney General Dick Thornburgh that I would postpone my retirement by at least 3 years if they would approve a transfer for me to head up one of the Field Divisions in the Southwest. Both indicated that they wanted me to continue my career in the Bureau and not long thereafter Sessions offered me the position of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Dallas Division. I jumped at the opportunity; the Dallas Division covers the Northern half of Texas and has always been one of the most active and productive offices in the Bureau. Most of my family lived in Texas and Oklahoma and I had many friends in the area. Dallas was also still the Office of Origin of the Kennedy Assassination case, but I didn’t expect any activity in that area as it had been so thoroughly investigated in the previous 28 years. I was wrong!
In 1991, Oliver Stone, released his motion picture “JFK”. The movie and its story line were almost entirely fictional, but it got a tremendous amount of publicity and caused the public to once again raise questions about the findings of the Warren Commission. Again, conspiracy theorists were coming out of the woodwork, bellowing their demands that the government come clean with what it knew. Now that I was SAC of Dallas, the very city of the assassination, I would unavoidably be at the center of the cacophony.
Upon the movie’s release, the Dallas Police Department was immediately inundated by a huge number of requests for access to their files. To accommodate the requests, the police moved the files from the department to the Dallas City Archives. In the process, they came across a surprise; several folders had slipped down in the filing cabinet and were not properly indexed or filed. One of the folders was a file on the Dallas Police Department’s brief interrogation of three individuals, “the three hoboes”.
In the years since the President’s assassination, wild theories had grown up around these men. Some claimed they were CIA agents or operatives; others said two of them had been identified as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy. With the discovery of the missing files, the theories only gained more exposure, as the disappearance was said to be part of the government cover-up. Fortunately the true identities of the men are duller than many conspiracy theorists have hoped.
The three hoboes were part of the eyewitness documentation to the Kennedy case, as they had been seen walking across the railroad track near Dealey Plaza soon after the three shots from Oswald’s rifle were fired on November 22, 1963. Hearing of these men from eyewitnesses, police promptly went in search of them. They were found a short time later, taken into custody, briefly interrogated at the Dallas police station, and then released. When their interrogation report disappeared, they became part of the mystery surrounding the assassination. Come to find out, the three men had come over on the rails from Fort Worth earlier that morning, were fed and cleaned up at a nearby soup kitchen, and were heading back across the railroad switchyard when they heard the shots and the ensuing commotion in Dealey Plaza. Because they didn’t want to get caught up in any trouble, they hurried to get out of the area, but were intercepted by the police.
Shortly after the hoboes’ interrogation, Dallas police took Lee Harvey Oswald into custody at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff, east of downtown Dallas. With the information available to them at the time, it looked as if they had their man. Officer J.D. Tippit had been shot and killed just a few blocks away, and Oswald was found with a pistol in his possession that was believed to have fired the fatal shots. At this point, the police shifted their attention to this strange character named Oswald and released the three hoboes. It would be more than a quarter century before law enforcement found any reason to look for or talk to them again.
During those years the police had no record of the men, as the files had apparently disappeared. Now in 1991, with the transfer of the files, they were found. Many conspiracy theorists believed the files had been destroyed, which made their reappearance still more ominous. But it was plainly shown in the files that the three hoboes had been identified, questioned and then released once it became clear that they had no information concerning the death of President Kennedy.