I conclude that, in the early 1960s, an unknown number of powerful people came together and held private discussions. These discussions centered on the bitterness and hatred they felt toward President Kennedy, and on how to eliminate him… To do what they did took masterful planning and manipulation. The fact that they accomplished it without paying the consequences tells us that they were successful.—Former FBI Agent Don Adams

 

The strongest documented evidence of a right wing plot against the President is the case of Joseph Adams Milteer, an ultra right fanatic…The Milteer case is important for two reasons: it proves the existence of a conspiracy and Milteer’s prior knowledge of the details of the plot, and it shows how the FBI handled the situation.—Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone

[The plot against JFK revealed by Milteer bears] an astounding parallel to what in the official account happened in the [JFK] assassination.—Harold Weisberg

Fifty years ago, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while seated in his open limousine as it motorcaded on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, TX.

Recently, important new evidence came to light about Joseph Adams Milteer, the Georgian who, nearly two weeks before the assassination, was recorded on tape talking about a pending plot to shoot the president from a tall building with a rifle that had been taken apart to get it inside. The new evidence confirms long-standing concerns that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI failed to adequately investigate the murder of President Kennedy. Since the FBI was the principal investigative arm of the Warren Commission, the evidence also is an endorsement of those who have criticized the Warren Report’s finding that there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic, behind the assassination.

Who was Joseph Milteer?

Joseph Milteer (1902-1974), of Quitman, GA, was a racist right-wing extremist activist who hated President Kennedy insanely and spent his life combating the Civil Rights movement. On Nov. 9, 1963, 13 days before the Kennedy assassination, Milteer had a lengthy conversation in a Miami, FL apartment with a childhood friend, Willie Somersett, in the course of which Milteer told Somersett about a plot that was afoot to assassinate JFK. Unknown to Milteer, Somersett, a secret informant for local Miami police, was surreptitiously tape-recording the conversation.

In that conversation Milteer confided that the killing of Kennedy “was in the working;” that the president could be killed “[f]rom an office building with a high-powered rifle;” that the rifle could be “disassemble[d]” to get it into the building; and that “[t]hey will pick up somebody within hours afterward, if anything like that would happen, just to throw the public off.” (Excerpts from the transcript of the conversation are set forth below at the end of this article.)

FBI Investigation

Miami police promptly notified the Secret Service and the FBI of Milteer’s remarks, giving them transcripts of the recorded conversation. The Secret Service and the FBI both quickly opened files on the matter, hastily investigated Milteer and within a few days—and prior to the assassination—closed those files.

Five full days after the JFK assassination, on Nov. 27, 1963, the FBI interviewed Milteer. The FBI’s official report of that interview is one and one-half pages long, consisting of six terse paragraphs, only one of which relates to the assassination. Shockingly, during the interview Milteer was not interrogated about his previously recorded statements to Somersett regarding plans to murder the president. Milteer was not even asked the vital question of what he knew of or had heard about any plots against President Kennedy. Unlike many other witnesses, Milteer was not asked where he was on Nov. 22, 1963.

There is no mention of Joseph Milteer in the Warren Report or the 26 volumes of exhibits published by the Warren Commission, and for years both the Secret Service and the FBI kept secret as much as they could about Milteer.

The public did not find out about Milteer’s recorded conversation with Somersett until three years after the assassination, when Miami police gave a transcript of that conversation to Bill Barry, a local newspaper reporter. It is said that Miami police decided to release the transcript because they realized the striking similarities between what Milteer said would happen and the Warren Report version of what did happen.

On Feb. 2, 1967, Barry published an article in The Miami News newspaper which discussed Milteer (without revealing his name) and quoted from the transcript of that conversation. In 1971 the entire transcript was published in Harold Weisberg’s book Frame-Up, and, for the first time, Milteer’s name was publicly revealed. Soon assassination scholars were suggesting that Milteer could be seen in a photograph taken in Dealey Plaza shortly before the president was murdered. Milteer, it was claimed, was the sixtyish, unsmiling man standing on the sidewalk with other spectators watching the presidential limousine as it drove past them a minute before the assassination. The spectator alleged to be Milteer is easy to spot: immediately to his right is a taller man wearing a dark hat, coat, and necktie.

 

Assassinations Committee Investigation

In 1978, the U.S. House of Representatives Assassinations Committee conducted a limited investigation of Milteer and published a portion of the transcript of Milteer’s recorded conversation with Somersett. As part of its investigation, the Assassinations Committee endeavored to determine whether Milteer had been photographed in Dealey Plaza. The Committee did not investigate the independent, more basic question of whether Milteer was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Less than a minute before the shots rang out, AP photographer James Altgens took the first of three famous 35 mm still photographs. That first photograph was snapped from behind and to the left of the  presidential limousine and the Secret Service escort car closely following it. The two vehicles can be seen passing along Houston Street just before turning onto Elm Street. In the background is an array of spectators lining the sidewalk. One of those spectators, an older, unsmiling bespectacled man who appears to have his arms folded across his chest is the individual alleged to be Milteer.

The Assassinations Committee appointed a panel of photographic and forensic experts who examined the Altgens photograph to determine if the spectator (who also appears in motion picture films taken at the time) was Milteer. The spectator, the panel explained, is “seen standing on the east side of Houston Street, just beyond the limousine. He is a white male appearing to be about 60 years of age.” 

The panel admitted that the individual in the photograph “bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Adams Milteer,” that the individual resembled Milteer “in age and general facial configuration” and that the individual was wearing “eyeglasses similar in general style to those favored by Milteer.”

Nonetheless, the panel concluded, with one member dissenting, that the individual was not Milteer. The panel’s conclusion rested on (1) differences in upper lip thickness and in head hair (the individual on Houston Street was “partially bald,” whereas Mitleer, the panel believed, “apparently had a full head of hair in [a] photograph taken several years after the assassination”); and (2) differences in height (the individual in the Houston Street photograph was estimated to be 5’ 10,’’ whereas Milteer, was, according to a Dec. 1, 1963 FBI report cited by the panel, six inches shorter at 5’ 4’’.

The panel did not regard its conclusion—that the motorcade spectator was not Milteer—as final and conclusive. As the panel did not deny, its estimates of the height of the individual alleged to be Milteer and of the other spectators lining the sidewalk rested on the unproved and unprovable assumption that the visible signposts were fixed at the height required by regulations and that the height of the members of the crowd approximated the norms of the general population.

Also, the panel’s conclusion that the individual was not Milteer depended on the accuracy of its assumptions that in 1963 Milteer had a full head of hair and that his height was 5’ 4”. As the panel phrased it: “In the absence of evidence that (1) Milteer had become extensively bald by 1963 or was wearing a hairpiece in the post-assassination photograph, or that (2) Milteer’s statural estimate of 64 inches [5’ 4”] was incorrect, the motorcade spectator could not have been Milteer.” In other words, the panel was acknowledging that, if it was wrong about Milteer’s head hair or his height, then the motorcade spectator could be Milteer.

 

Lingering Questions About Milteer Answered

For years the case of Joseph Milteer has posed difficult questions. Two of the more important ones are these. First, why was the FBI’s Nov. 27, 1963 interview so inadequate? Particularly, why was he not queried about what he had said on tape to Somersett about the plot to kill JFK?  Second, was the House Assassinations Committee panel right about Milteer not being the spectator in question in the Altgens photograph?

These issues have now been resolved due to newly available evidence. The new evidence is to be found in a recent book, From an Office Building With a High-Powered Rifle (TrineDay, 2012), whose author, Don Adams, a retired FBI agent (and career law enforcement officer), personally investigated, personally questioned, and was personally acquainted with Joseph Milteer back in 1963. It was Adams, then an FBI rookie special agent stationed in Thomasville, GA who interviewed  Milteer and took his statement five days after the assassination.

The reason the interview with Milteer was so unsatisfactory, Adams explains, is that he had been ordered by his superior, an FBI special agent in charge, to ask five scripted, narrow questions and nothing else: “[My superior] cautioned me that the interview had to be done carefully and that he was going to instruct me as to the questions I should ask. He added that I was to ask nothing more… I was to obtain descriptive data on Milteer and then ask only the five questions he had dictated [to me]… This struck me as strange at the time, and it never happened again during my entire [20-year] career with the Bureau… To this day, I can’t help but wonder why he ordered me to do this and whether, had I been free to pursue other lines of questioning, I could have discovered information that might had led to the truth.”  (The five questions put to Milteer are set forth below at the end of this article.)

The reason Milteer was not questioned about his recorded conversation with Somersett concerning a plot to assassinate JFK?  Because the interrogator, Don Adams, had not been told about Milteer’s conversation with Somersett!  In 1963 Adams was unaware of that conversation: “I did not know of the Nov. 9, 1963 tape recording until 1993… Here I am, the case agent of the investigation involving Milteer, and I am never informed by anyone in the FBI about the tape recording or the direct threat. Obviously, this information was purposefully kept from me in total violation of the strictest Bureau rules… When I was assigned to the Milteer investigation… I should have been informed of the threat against the president that was recorded on Nov. 9.”

Adams adds: “I [am] dumbfounded. The Miami police and the FBI knew of this tape-recording before I was assigned to locate and interview Milteer, yet I had been told nothing about it!  Something was drastically wrong. The Bureau that I [was] part of and respected just did not work this way.”

We also learn from the Adams book that the individual in the Altgens photograph was indeed Milteer. For one thing, Don Adams positively identifies the individual as Milteer, which ought to be good enough for everyone.

Adams did not become aware of the Altgens photograph until 1975. But he has no doubts that it is Milteer who appears in the photograph. The first time Adams saw the photograph he knew it was Milteer: “I saw a face I immediately recognized… There was Milteer, standing with a group of people in Dealey Plaza, looking toward the presidential limousine… just seconds before the President was shot… When I saw that photograph… I finally knew [that Milteer had been present when JFK was assassinated]… [Milteer was] standing in Dealey Plaza moments before the assassination.”

We further learn from the Adams book that the Assassinations Committee’s panel of experts was wrong about Milteer’s height and his head hair. 

In deciding that Milteer stood 5’ 4”, the panel relied, as stated previously, on an FBI report dated Dec. 1, 1963, and now in the National Archives. That lengthy document, however, as Adams patiently explains, is not reliable; it includes a fraudulent report and information that has been altered and was not prepared by Adams, the only FBI agent who actually interviewed Milteer on Nov. 27. (Unknown to the panel, the Dec. 1 document conflicts with a Jan. 22, 1964 FBI report which gives Milteer’s height as 5’ 5”.)

Milteer actually was not as short as the panel believed. “I know,” Don Adams tells us, “he was taller than 5’ 4”.”  Adams himself prepared descriptive data reports which stated that Milteer was 5’ 8,” and Secret Service reports listed Milteer as either 5’ 7” or 5’ 8”. Since the panel estimated the motorcade spectator to be 5’ 10”, this is within two or three inches of Milteer’s true height, and under the circumstances this is within an acceptable margin of error. The panel was flat wrong in ruling out Milteer as the individual in the photograph on the theory that there was a full six-inch discrepancy in height between the individual and Milteer.

The panel of experts was also wrong about Milteer’s head hair. For one thing, the panel too hastily rejected the 50-50 possibility that Milteer was wearing a hairpiece in his post-1963 photographs. More importantly, the very FBI document the panel used to ascertain Milteer’s height describes Milteer’s hair as “partially thinning and gray.”  The individual in the Altgens photograph appears to have gray, thinning hair. That individual can no longer, based on head hair characteristics, be ruled out as Milteer.

In short, based on a positive identification by someone who ought to know, and based also on new, more accurate information about Milteer’s physical characteristics, the individual in the Altgens photograph definitely was Milteer. It is impossible that Milteer’s presence in Dealey Plaza was a coincidence. The only explanation is that Milteer knew in advance that JFK would be assassinated. Milteer’s presence at the time and place of the Kennedy assassination is a matter of the most sinister import. There must have been a plot, and Milteer must have known about it.

 

Fraudulent or Missing FBI Records

From an Office Building With a High-Powered Rifle relates that, in addition to the FBI document of Dec. 1, 1963, important other FBI records relating to Milteer in the National Archives are fraudulent. Still other FBI documents about Milteer are of questionable authenticity, or are unaccountably missing from the National Archives. Numerous FBI documents in the National Archives, including fraudulent or questionable ones, are photographically reproduced in the Adams book:

● An FBI teletype sent six hours after the assassination states that it had been “ascertained” that Milteer was in Quitman that day. This teletype, in the National Archives, is fraudulent. Immediately after the assassination Adams was the FBI agent assigned to find Milteer. Assisted by local law enforcement, Adams searched diligently for Milteer from the day of the assassination, Friday, Nov. 22, until the following Wednesday, Nov. 27, when (assisted by another FBI special agent) he personally found, detained, and then interviewed Milteer. “I am sure Milteer was not in Valdosta, nor was he in Quitman, Georgia, until five days after the assassination… By providing false information, [the teletype] essentially gave an alibi to a suspect known to have planned to kill the president.”

● An FBI Letterhead Memorandum dated Nov. 27 refers to a nonexistent telephone call to Adams. The document contains the false signature and the false initials of Adams, written in by an unknown person. “The entire document is fraudulent,” Adams informs us.

● The report that Adams prepared of his Nov. 27 interview with Milteer is missing from the National Archives. It has been replaced by a fraudulent document which lifts information from Adams’ vanished report.

● Various other FBI Milteer records from 1963 or 1964 are either fraudulent, misleading, or missing.

 

Informant Oswald?

Not all of From an Office Building With a High-Powered Rifle deals with Milteer. Sometimes its author turns his attention to other people, including Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year old ex-Marine and ex-defector to the Soviet Union, who, the Warren Commission claimed, was the sole assassin of President Kennedy.

President Lyndon B. Johnson famously described Lee Harvey Oswald as “quite a mysterious fellow,” and many JFK assassination scholars, looking at Oswald’s intrigue-filled life, his exotic travels to (among other places) Finland, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico, and his multiple encounters with law enforcement agents or intelligence operatives, have concluded that Oswald may have secretly been a paid U.S. government informant or some other law enforcement or intelligence agency asset.

Donald Adams thinks these scholars may be right.

In June 1964, Adams transferred to the Dallas FBI office, where the JFK assassination was the office’s first priority. Because of his experiences there, because of his knowledge of the unusual way the Dallas office dealt with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination, and because after the assassination the Dallas FBI office destroyed documents relating to Oswald, Adams concludes in his book that “Oswald must have been a government informant for the CIA, the FBI, or both.”

Think of that. A man who was an FBI agent for two decades and who personally and officially investigated the assassination in 1963-64 agrees with the critics of the Warren Commission who maintain that it is likely Lee Harvey Oswald secretly worked for the FBI or the CIA!  Of course, the FBI, the CIA, and the Warren Commission all denied that Oswald secretly worked for the government.

 

Milteer Reassessed

It is time to reassess Joseph Milteer in light of the information about him that has become available during the half-century since the most terrible unsolved political murder in this nation in the 20th Century.

In delving into the Milteer matter it needs to be emphasized that there is no evidence that Milteer himself was part of the assassination plot he told Somersett about. In his conversation with Somersett, Milteer cleverly avoided claiming that he was part of the plot he was talking about (although he evidently believed that murdering the president was a dandy idea). He cleverly did not say that he planned to kill the president. He cleverly did not make any direct threats against Kennedy. The House Assassinations Committee and many scholars have mistakenly asserted that Milteer threatened to kill JFK or that he planned to kill JFK. Even Don Adams commits this error. But what is important about Milteer is this: did he know in advance of a plot to shoot the president?

Yes, he did.

Consider the following facts, which five decades after the JFK assassination are now well-established:

● Weeks before the assassination Milteer confided to an old friend that there was a extant plot to murder President Kennedy by shooting him with a rifle from a tall building; and there are very good reasons for believing Milteer knew what he was talking about.

● The FBI was apprised of the alleged plot and took the matter seriously, but carried out a rushed investigation of Milteer and then closed its files prior to the assassination.

● After the assassination, FBI officials assigned a rookie agent to investigate Milteer and withheld vital pieces of information from that agent. The agent was not even told of Milteer’s conversation with Somersett.

● It was not until five days after the assassination that the agent, after intensive searching, found Milteer.

● During Milteer’s brief interview by the FBI agent on Nov. 27, 1963, the agent, as he had been instructed, put only five questions to Milteer, only one of which related to the assassination, and none of which inquired whether Milteer had known about a plot against JFK. Nor was he asked where he was on Nov. 22, 1963.

● The official report prepared by the agent disappeared down the memory hole and has been replaced or supplemented by other reports that are false or misleading.

● The House Assassinations Committee briefly investigated Milteer. It did not independently investigate whether Milteer had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination. It did ask a panel of experts to examine the Altgens photograph, but the panel’s work product was flawed by its incorrect information about Milteer’s height and head hair.

● Milteer was not in Georgia on the day of the assassination. He was in Dealey Plaza in Dallas watching the presidential motorcade pass by only moments before the gunfire began. Following the assassination Milteer’s whereabouts was unknown until he returned to Georgia five days later.

● By any objective standard, the FBI investigation of Milteer was unprofessional. Atypically for the FBI, especially when the murder of an American president was involved, the investigation was lackadaisical  and superficial.

 

Other 1963 Plots Against JFK

We know now that in 1963, quite apart from the Milteer matter, the FBI and the Secret Service received information from various sources indicating that JFK was in danger of being killed by a sniper. In March 1963 the Secret Service received a postcard warning that JFK would be assassinated while riding in a motorcade. In the weeks leading up to the assassination, the Secret Service and the FBI became aware of alleged plans to shoot the president from a building while he was motorcading, possibly in Chicago, IL, in Miami, or in Tampa, FL, and special security precautions were taken in those cities to protect JFK when he visited them. (Those extra precautions were thrown to the winds when JFK visited Dallas.)

It is now reasonably clear that the plot Milteer talked about was but one of several plots against JFK in 1963. It is unknown whether any of these plots were interrelated. However, since he was in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, the plot Milteer knew about was the plot that succeeded in causing the death of John F. Kennedy.

 

Quitman Crackpot

Harold Weisberg, who published the entire transcript of Milteer’s recorded conversation with Somersett in 1971 and revealed Milteer’s name for the first time to the general public, was as usual right when he said that Milteer’s description of plans to assassinate Kennedy “amounted to a blueprint of what is officially alleged [by the Warren Commission] to have happened.”

A few scholars of the JFK assassination—members of the dwindling band of true believers in the Warren Report and its lone-assassin scenario—derisively describe Milteer as not “the Miami prophet” but “the Quitman Crackpot.”  These scholars dispute Milteer’s foreknowledge of JFK’s assassination. They heap scorn on the claim that Milteer prophesied the president’s murder. They deny that Milteer really knew of a plot and say he was just “a racist blowhard” and “a crackpot who shot off his mouth.” They stoutly deny that Milteer was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and they reject the claim that the spectator in the Altgens photograph was Milteer. Some go so far as to assert that the spectator doesn’t even look like Milteer.

These scholars rest their arguments on strained interpretations of the entire Milteer-Somersett conversation (which was lengthy and not limited to JFK). These scholars also rely on the conclusion of the Assassination Committee’s panel that it was not Milteer in the Altgens photograph—a conclusion, we now know, was erroneous. These scholars, of course, did not have the benefit of Don Adams’ eyewitness identification of Milteer in the photograph.

 

A “Very Jubilant” Milteer

The day after the assassination, Milteer had several unrecorded conversations with Somersett, who reported that Milteer was “very jubilant” about John Kennedy’s murder. “Everything ran true to form,” he told Somersett. “I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he [Kennedy] would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle… I don’t do any guessing.”  

Two days after the assassination, Milteer and Somersett had a conversation in South Carolina. At that time, according to an FBI report, “Milteer advised that they did not have to worry about Lee Harvey Oswald getting caught because he ‘doesn’t know nothing’ and that the ‘right wing’ is in the clear. Milteer further related that, ‘The patriots have outsmarted the communists and had infiltrated the communist group in order that they [the communists] could carry out the plan without the right wingers becoming involved.’”

Amazingly, therefore, right after the JFK murder, Milteer was close to espousing a theory that has nowadays been embraced by many responsible assassination scholars—namely, that the supposed communist (or Marxist) assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald (who himself claimed he was a “patsy”), was framed to protect the true assassins, who were on the political right (right-wing extremists, lunatic-fringe anti-Communists, fanatical anti-Castro Cubans, racists, certain members of the military/industrial/intelligence complex who despised JFK or thought him dangerous, and perhaps some organized crime figures).

Milteer was a crackpot racist; he may have been a blowhard. But nevertheless he somehow knew that President Kennedy would be shot with a rifle from a building weeks before this horrible jolting event happened. He was in Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot dead. Shortly thereafter he intimated that right-wing elements had arranged for the communists to be blamed for the assassination. In retrospect, Milteer was, in regard to the assassination, more prophetic than screwballish.

 

Conclusion

“I have come to believe that the FBI’s investigation [of the JFK assassination] was compromised from the top down, beginning with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,” Don Adams writes.

These are strong words. Adams, of course, is not alone in savaging the quality of the FBI’s overall investigation, but his comments are unique in that the stinging criticism comes from an ex-FBI agent who actually participated in that investigation—an agent who not only not only bears no grudge against the Bureau but admires and praises it.

The problem, Adams tells us, was tyrannical FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who allowed his raging dislike of the Kennedy brothers (which on one occasion Adams personally witnessed), as well as grimy political considerations, to adversely impact the FBI’s investigation and ultimately to fatally undermine it. Hoover, who ran the Bureau as a fiefdom for 48 years (1924-1972), was full of low cunning, and, when he deemed it appropriate, could be contemptuous of the search for truth. When he thought it necessary he would commit political dirty tricks to ruin, intimidate or silence people. For reasons of his own, he made sure the official FBI investigation of a president’s murder was a pretended inquiry. This means that the Warren Report, by and large the product of the FBI’s investigation, often cannot be trusted. It also means that J. Edgar Hoover’s pettiness and vindictiveness made it easier for the conspirators who committed the political murder of the century to get away with it. 

Don Adams’ eye-opening book could have been subtitled An FBI Agent Relates How J. Edgar Hoover Subverted the Investigation of the Murder of an American President and Helped the Assassins Escape Detection.

Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. is Professor of Law Emeritus in the UGA School of Law. This is his 34th article on the JFK assassination.

Appendix 1: Excerpts from Transcript of Recorded Conversation of Nov. 9, 1963

 

SOMERSETT. I think Kennedy is coming here November 18 to make some kind of speech. I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it will be on TV.

MILTEER. You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans; there are so many of them here.

SOMERSETT. 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. What?

MILTEER. The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

SOMERSETT. Well, how in the hell do you figure would be he best way to get him?

MILTEER. From an office building with a high-powered rifle.

*  *  *  *

MILTEER. He [Kennedy] knows he is a marked man.

SOMERSETT. You think he knows he is a marked man?

MILTEER. Sure he does.

SOMERSETT. They are really going to try to kill him?

MILTEER. Oh, yeah; it is in the working.

*  *  *  *

SOMERSETT. Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition. I believe you may have figured out a way to get him, the office building and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them buildings everywhere he is going. Do you know whether they do that or not?

MILTEER. Well, if they have any suspicion, they do that, of course. But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn’t.

*  *  *  *

MILTEER. Sure, disassemble a gun; you don’t have to take a gun up there; you can take it up in pieces; all those guns come knock down; you can take them apart.

Note: An audio of portions of the recording may be heard on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdbVyhzCcq4

 

Appendix 2: The Five Questions Milteer Was Asked by the FBI on Nov. 27, 1963

(1) With whom had he made contact recently?

(2) Had he been to the Constitution Party’s National Convention?

(3) What were the organizations with which he was affiliated?

(4) Had he any knowledge of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, on Sept. 15, 1963?

(5) Had he ever made any threats to assassinate the President, or had he participated in a plot to kill President Kennedy?

Note: The official FBI report of Milteer’s interview gives this as his answer to the fifth question: “Milteer emphatically denies ever making threats to assassinate President Kennedy or participating in any such assassination. He stated he has never heard anyone make such threats. He also denied making threats against anyone subsequent to the assassination of President Kennedy. He stated he does not know, nor has ever been in the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby to his knowledge.”