JFK Assassination: 60 Years Later (Part 2 – A Hero on the Trail of Evil)

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” – George Orwell, 1984

I am writing this column on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023, the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. As you might have read previously, this is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theory: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, and the U.S. Senate Hart-Schweiker and Church Committees each investigated the possible foreknowledge and ties of Joseph Adams Milteer, a racist right-wing fanatic who lived in Quitman and Valdosta, to a JFK murder conspiracy. Those investigations are part of South Georgia’s historical record, and I’m surprised the stories aren’t common knowledge in this area (though not really, considering the narrow-minded thinking endemic – but not in all cases – among mainstream news media and education).

As you may recall, on Nov. 9, 1963, 13 days before the Kennedy assassination, a Miami, Fla., police informant secretly tape-recorded Milteer confiding that the JFK hit “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.”
The House Select Committee on Assassinations even examined a photograph of a man in his 60s, resembling Milteer, standing in the crowd near the Presidential motorcade as it passed down Houston Street, less than a minute before the shooting of JFK in Dealey Plaza. The Assassinations Committee subjected the iconic photo to the rigors of scientific analysis by photographic and forensic experts.

The results were inconclusive. Most of the experts decided the man wasn’t Milteer. However, one member of the panel, Robert J. Groden, disagreed and released the dissenting opinion that it was Milteer. The majority of the panel opined that the individual wasn’t Milteer due to differences in upper lip thickness, hair on his head, and height.

But Donald A. Adams, a retired FBI agent and career law enforcement officer, concluded in his 2012 book From an Office Building With a High‐Powered Rifle (TrineDay) that the individual pictured in Dealey Plaza was in fact Milteer. According to a 2013 article by Donald E. Wilkes Jr., University of Georgia School of Law, Don Adams “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.”

Adams didn’t become aware of the photo in question until 1975. Adams stated that upon his first time seeing it, “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.” Adams also stated that the Assassinations Committee’s panel of experts had received fraudulent information about Milteer’s height and a head hair description for Milteer prepared by the FBI does match that of the motorcade spectator in the photo, “partially thinning and gray.”

According to Wilkes’ article, “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.”

Further, according to Wilkes’ article, “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 [the Quitman police chief, Brooks County sheriff, and Lowndes County officers], 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.’ ” Adams alleged that various FBI Milteer records from 1963 or 1964 “are either fraudulent, misleading, or missing.”

In a YouTube program, Adams detailed how he had surveilled Milteer in Quitman over previous threats against Kennedy. Those threats involved snipers hitting JFK from a palm tree overlooking a presidential motorcade to an event in Miami or from a hotel near the White House in Washington, D.C. According to numerous researchers and articles, the Secret Service altered the President’s travel plans in light of the Miami sniping threat, and he was transported by a helicopter to and from the event there instead of in a motorcade.

In South Georgia, Adams had surreptitiously photographed Milteer from a distance and had even taken some propaganda fliers from Milteer while disguised undercover in ragged clothes as a bum.

After the JFK murder, Adams pulled Milteer over in his distinctive VW van that displayed signs supporting leading racist U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond for President and segregation. Adams related that upon questioning Milteer at a law enforcement office in Valdosta, Milteer had a tape recorder hidden (to record the interview) under a banana in a bag that he had supposedly grabbed for lunch.

Wilkes states: “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.”

Adams noted that his FBI superiors did not inform him about the Nov. 9, 1963, secret tape recording of Milteer’s threats against JFK in Miami even though he was the case agent of the investigation involving Milteer. He did not know about that recording until 1993, when he read about in the bestselling book High Treason by Harrison Edward Livingstone and Robert J. Groden.

“In June 1964, Adams transferred to the Dallas FBI office, where the JFK assassination was the office’s first priority,” Donald E. Wilkes states. Adams was then able to view the Abraham Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, years before it was released to the public. Adams stated in a YouTube program that he saw the President was hit by gunshots from the front, in contradiction to the official account, but was told by his superiors to keep quiet.

Adams recalled facing much animosity and bias from the clique of older law enforcement officers. For example, during the Milteer probe, Adams overheard a senior FBI agent tell a South Georgia officer in his office that Adams couldn’t be trusted because he was “a Yankee and a Catholic.”

“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 wrote in his book.

Adams passed away at the age of 83 in Akron, Ohio, on June14, 2014. According to his obituary, Adams’ dad was an Akron Police Detective. Adams was a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War.

According to the obituary, after Adams’ appointment to the Bureau, “he and his family moved to several cities, while he built a solid body of work as a paradigm investigator. He worked many interesting investigations including art and jewelry robberies, transportation crashes, fugitive hunts, white collar crimes, hostage situations and bank robberies. Don had a real affinity for bank robberies, and his ‘squad’ in Buffalo, N.Y., led all F.B.I. offices in convictions, with a 94 percent conviction rate, which had been only 37 percent at the time when he took the helm. He had memorable arrests involving the ‘Weathermen’ anti-war protesters in the 60s, was instrumental in the conviction of a sitting judge, as well as the unraveling of local governmental corruption in the mid-70s.

“Perhaps his most memorable achievement was related to his investigation which was germane to the assassination of President John F. Kenned

y. That investigation and Don’s later, further inquiry were the impetus for him to author From an Office Building, with a High-Powered Rifle. He later traveled the country giving speeches on the subject. He appeared on television and radio, giving interviews to places as far away as Australia. Don believed this to be the crowning achievement, although he had countless other accomplishments in his chosen field.”

After his retirement from the FBI, Adams worked in corporate security and investigations, but also served as the Chief of Police in Fairlawn, Ohio. He represented the second of now four generations of policemen.

Adams was able to have his crucial book about the JFK assassination and links to South Georgia, From an Office Building With a High‐Powered Rifle, published only two years before his death.

Thus, Former Agent Adams did have some measure of a victory against the Deep State despite their ruthless efforts to obstruct and suppress his best efforts to investigate a Quitman, Ga. man’s links to the murder of the 35th President of the United States.

To Be Continued