JFKcountercoup: The Tampa Plot in Retrospect
JFK at MacDill AFB, Florida, November 18, 193
Former SS Agent Blaine said that he has kept some of the advance reports on the Tampa trip, reports that had previously been reported destroyed.
JFK at MacDill AFB, Florida, November 18, 193
Former SS Agent Blaine said that he has kept some of the advance reports on the Tampa trip, reports that had previously been reported destroyed.
The Tampa Plot in Retrospect - By William Kelly
Four days before he was killed in Dallas President Kennedy visited Tampa, Florida, where he addressed the Steelworkers Union and then later in Miami the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) to whom he delivered a major speech on Cuba, part of which was said to have been designed to confirm his support for a coup in Cuba.
In the course of this trip, which included a long motorcade that began and ended at MacDill AFB, Kennedy met privately with the commander of MacDill, a base where a quick-strike unit was prepared to intervene in Cuba if called upon to do so. As Peter Dale Scott has pointed out, MacDill AFB was the recipient of the special message from Dallas PD officer Stringfellow informing the Quick-Strike unit that the accused assassin was a Cuban Communist, a possible instigation to mobilize.
Also in the course of the visit to Tampa, the Secret Service and local authorities investigated a plot to kill the president, a conspiracy that included shooting the President with a high powered rifle while he rode in the motorcade, and a patsy, Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban affiliated with the FPCC who was trying to get back into Cuba, and eventually did so, via the same route Oswald allegedly tried to take via Texas and Mexico City.
News of the Tampa plot was confined to a single newspaper report, and picked up by the UPI, but Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann explore this plot further and in some detail in their books “Ultimate Sacrifice” (Carroll & Graf, 2005) and “Legacy of Secrecy” (Counterpoint, 2008).
While their view of the assassination is somewhat warped by the adherence to their theory that what happened at Dealey Plaza was planned by Mafia dons in league with some CIA officers and Cubans planning a “C-Day” coup and US invasion of Cuba, much of what they have uncovered is true and can be independently verified.
Laying the basic ground work in “Ultimate Sacrifice – John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK,” at first they intentionally neglected to name their primary suspect to lead the Coup in Cuba, a coup that the CIA was unmistakably plotting. Desmond Fitzgerald (on September 25, 1964) informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff of their “Valkyrie” plan, based on a failed plot to kill Hitler adapted to Cuba. This plan targeted disenchanted Cuban military officers and a few revolutionary figures close to Castro.
That alone is a major research breakthrough, and if they would have stopped right there and entwined the details of how that Cuban coup planning was redirected to Dealey Plaza, it would have been enough, but they further developed their theory with the additional details - that the Kennedys had a approved a coup in Cuba to take place on C-Day (Dec. 1) and that this plot was hijacked by Mafia dons Santo Traficante and Carlos Marcello and used to kill Kennedy.
