It is not known what the journalists found but on 23rd April 1964, Hunter was shot dead by Creighton Wiggins, a policeman in the pressroom of a Long Beach police station. Wiggins initially claimed that his gun fired when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. In court this was discovered that this was impossible and it was decided that Hunter had been murdered. Wiggins finally admitted he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer, Errol F. Greenleaf, testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place. In January 1965, both were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.
Jim Koethe decided to write a book about the assassination of Kennedy. However, he died on 21st September, 1964. It seems that a man broke into his Dallas apartment and killed him by a karate chop to the throat. Tom Howard died of a heart-attack, aged 48, in March, 1965.
This photograph was taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963. It has been argued by Daniel Hopsicker that the men in the photograph are all members of Operation 40. Hopsicker suggests that the man closest to the camera on the left is Felix Rodriguez, next to him is Porter Goss and Barry Seal.Hopsicker adds that Frank Sturgis is attempting to hide his face with his coat. It has been claimed that in the picture are Albertao 'Loco' Blanco (3rd right) and Jorgo Robreno (4th right).
Operation 40 was the code name for a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored counterintelligence group composed mostly by Cuban exiles. It was approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960, after the January 1959 Cuban Revolution. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon and included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Livingston Merchant of the State Department, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles of the CIA. CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list were several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. Tracy Barnes functioned as head of the Cuban Task Force. He called a meeting on January 18, 1960, in his office in Quarters Eyes, near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which the navy had lent while new buildings were being constructed in Langley. Those who gathered there included Howard Hunt, future head of the Watergate team and a writer of crime novels; Frank Bender, a friend of Trujillo; Jack Esterline, who had come straight from Venezuela where he directed a CIA group; psychological warfare expert David A. Phillips, and others. Vice-President Richard Nixon was the Cuban "case officer," and had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush Sr and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, as fundraisers. Operation 40, Mexico-City-1963. Special operation allegedly charged with assasinating Fidel Castro (killed a bunch of other people instead),
It seems that Operation 40, created to remove Fidel Castro, had been redirected to kill Kennedy, as part of a freelance operation. David Atlee Phillips in the unpublished manuscript entitled The AMLASH Legacy wrote: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt." And Frank Sturgis stated that "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents."
RICHARD NIXON, THE CASE MANAGER OIF OPERATION 40November 21, 1963 - Richard M. Nixon in Dallas, Texas
CIA Nazi Rats and Miami's Castro Rats are hiding the picture of Richard NixonRivhard M Nixon appointed Colonel John Alston "Jack" Crichton, U.S. Army Special Agent OSS in Europe, Second World War.in Operation , which Warren Hinckle and William Turner described in Deadly Secrets, as the “assassins-for-hire” organization. Jack Crichton was the commanding officer of the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment.\
488th Military Intelligence Detachment
In 1956 Jack Alston Crichton
started up his own spy unit, the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment
in Dallas. Crichton served as the unit's commander under Lieutenant
Colonel George Whitmeyer, who was in overall command of all Army Reserve
units in East Texas. In an interview Crichton claimed that there were
"about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were
from the Dallas Police Department."
In November 1963 Jack Alston
Crichton was involved in the arrangements of the visit that President
John F. Kennedy made to Dallas. His close friend, Deputy Police Chief
George L. Lumpkin, and a fellow member of the the 488th Military
Intelligence Detachment, drove the pilot car of Kennedy's motorcade.
Also in the car was Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, commander of
all Army Reserve units in East Texas. The pilot car stopped briefly in
front of the Texas School Book Depository, where Lumpkin spoke to a
policeman controlling traffic at the corner of Houston and Elm.
As
Russ Baker points out in Family of Secrets (2008) Crichton served as
the "intelligence unit's only commander... until he retired from the
488th in 1967".
The Dallas Police preparing for the visit of President Kennedy ...
https://www.youtube.com › watch
Operation 40 Members:
Alvin Ross;
Antonio Cuesta;
Antonio Veciana;
Barry Seal
Bernard Barker
Carl Elmer Jenkins;
Carlos Bringuier;
David A. Phillips
David Sanchez Morales
E. Howard Hunt,
Eladio del Valle
Eugenio Martinez (‘Musculito’);
Felipe Rivero;
Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia;
Frank Bender
Frank Sturgis;
Gaspar ‘Gasparito’ Jimenez Escobedo;
George Bush
Gerry Patrick Hemming;
Guillermo Novo;
Henry Hecksher.
Hermino Diaz Garcia;
Isidro Borjas;
Jack Crichton
Jack Esterline,
Jose Basulto;
Jose Dionisio Suarez;
Jose Sanjenis Perdomo, Chief of Police Cuban Pres Carlos Prio
Juan Manuel Salvat;
Luis Posada Carriles;
Nazario Sargent;
Orlando Bosch;
Paulino Sierra;
Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz;
Porter Goss;
Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quinterol
Ricardo Morales Navarrete
Richard Bissell
Rolando Masferrer;
Ted Shackley, CIA station-chief in Miami
Thomas G. Clines;
Tracy Barnes
Virgilio Paz Romero;
William C. Bishop;
William Harvey.
William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee;
William “Rip” Robertson;
(1) Penn Jones, Jr, Disappearing Witnesses included in The Rebel (22nd November, 1983)
Shortly after dark on Sunday night, November 24, 1963, after Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a meeting took place in Jack Ruby's apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Five persons were present. George Senator and Attorney Tom Howard were present and having a drink in the apartment when two newsmen arrived. The newsmen were Bill Hunter of the Long Beach California Press Telegram and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald. Attorney C.A. Droby of Dallas arranged the meeting for the two newsmen, Jim Martin, a close friend of George Senator's, was also present at the apartment meeting. This writer asked Martin if he thought it was unusual for Senator to forget the meeting while testifying in Washington on April 22, 1964, since Bill Hunter, who was a newsman present at the meeting, was shot to death that very night. Martin grinned and said: "Oh, you're looking for a conspiracy."
I nodded yes and he grinned and said, "You will never find it."
I asked soberly, "Never find it, or not there?"
He added soberly, "Not there."
Bill Hunter, a native of Dallas and an award-winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and reading a book in the police station called the "Public Safety Building." Two policemen going off duty came into the press room, and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially ruled to be "no more than three feet." The policeman said he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.
Hunter, who covered the assassination for his paper, the Long Beach Press Telegram had written:
"Within minutes of Ruby's execution of Oswald, before the eyes of millions watching television, at least two Dallas attorneys appeared to talk with him."
Hunter was quoting Tom Howard who died of a heart attack in Dallas a few months after Hunter's own death. Lawyer Tom Howard was observed acting strangely to his friends two days before his death. Howard was taken to the hospital by a "friend" according to the newspapers. No autopsy was performed.
Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe was killed by a karate chop to the throat just as he emerged from a shower in his apartment on Sept. 21, 1964. His murderer was not indicted.
What went on in that significant meeting in Ruby's and Senator's apartment?
Few are left to tell. There is no one in authority to ask the question, since the Warren Commission has made its final report, and the House Select Committee has closed its investigation.
(2) David Welsh, Ramparts (November, 1966)
Hunter covered the Kennedy assassination more or less on a lark. He was a police reporter for the Long Beach paper and a good one, with a knack for getting along with cops. He drank with them, played cards with them in the press room-- he was a sharp and lucky player - and they would often call him at home when a story broke. Hunter was a big man, described by friends as rough, jovial, "very physical," with an attractive wife and three children.
There was no real need for the Long Beach paper to send a reporter to Dallas, but Hunter, who grew up there, managed to promote a free trip for himself with the city desk. In Dallas he ran into Jim Koethe, with whom he had worked in Wichita Falls, Texas. Koethe asked him to come along to the meeting in Ruby's apartment; they arrived to find Senator and Tom Howard having a drink.
Bill Hunter was killed just after midnight on the morning of April 23, 1964 - only a few hours after George Senator testified before Warren Commission counsel that he "could not recall" the meeting in Ruby's apartment. Hunter was seated at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach public safety building when detective Creighton Wiggins Jr. and his partner burst into the room. A single bullet fired from Wiggins' gun struck Hunter in the heart, killing him almost instantly. The mystery novel he was reading, entitled Stop This Man!, slipped blood-spattered from his fingers.
Wiggins' story underwent several changes. His final version was that he and his partner had been playing cops and robbers with guns drawn when his gun started to slip from his hand and went off. The two officers were convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Sentnece was suspended. There were so many contradictions in Wiggins' testimony that Bill Shelton, Hunter's city editor and old friend from Texas, is "still not satisfied" with the official verdict. He declines to comment about any possible connection between Hunter's death and the Kennedy assassination. "But I'd believe anything," he says. It is a curious footnote that Shelton's brother Keith was among the majority of Dallas newspapermen who found it expedient to leave their jobs after covering the assassination. Keith was president of the Dallas Press Club and gave up a promising career as political columnist for the Times-Herald to settle in a small north Texas town. One reporter who was asked to resign put it this way: "It looks like a studied effort to remove all the knowledgeable newsmen who covered the assassination."
(3) Bill Sloan, JFK: Breaking the Silence (1993)
At approximately 2 a.m. on the morning of April 23, 1964, Hunter was sitting at his desk in the press room of the Long Beach police station and reading a mystery novel entitled Stop This Man, when two detectives - both of whom were later described as "friends" of Hunter - came into the room.
Initially, there was considerable confusion over exactly what happened next. One officer was first quoted as saying he dropped his gun, causing it to discharge as it struck the floor. Later, he changed his story to say that he and the other detective were engaged in "horseplay" with their loaded weapons when the tragedy occurred.
Whatever the case, a single shot suddenly rang out, striking Hunter where he sat. An autopsy later showed that the .38-caliber bullet plowed straight through Hunter's heart.
He died instantly, without ever moving or saying a word.
"My boss called me at 2 a.m. and told me Bill Hunter had been shot," Bill Shelton recalls. "He wasn't satisfied with the story that the cop had dropped his gun, and as it turned out, that wasn't what happened at all."
The newspaper charged police with covering up the facts in the case, which Long Beach Police Chief William Mooney vigorously denied. Detectives Creighton Wiggins, Jr., and Errol F. Greenleaf were relieved of their duties and subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. In January 1965, both were convicted and given identical three-year probated sentences.
Two weeks after the shooting, in a letter of resignation to his chief, Detective Wiggins wrote: "It is a tragic thing that this must come about in this manner, for I have lost a wonderful friend in Bill Hunter and so have all the police officers of the department... he was truly the policeman's friend."
While Hunter's death made sensational headlines in California, it was scarcely noted 2,000 miles away in Dallas. Jim Koethe surely mourned his friend, but if he connected Hunter's death in any way with their visit to Ruby's apartment five months earlier, he didn't mention it to any of his acquaintances at the Times-Herald.
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