News and Views

Just Imagine — Essay on the Chicago Plot written by Charles R. Drago

May 18, 2026

The AARC is pleased to present this special commentary to the AARC:

[My primary source is “The Plot to Kill JFK” by Edwin Black, as published in “The Chicago Independent” of November,1975.]

Endless regurgitations of “debates” of what in fact are long-settled evidentiary issues relating to the JFK assassination once again surge. So who’s ready for the 2000th demolition of the SBT? The 1193rd proofs package of post mortem medical evidence falsification? The 901st refutation of LHO’s official defection explanation?

As indicated in the title of this brief essay, I am convinced of the value of the application of what I term the artistic imagination to the construction and deconstruction of historic mysteries.

Such a creative force is indicated in open-minded dissections of the JFK conspiracy. For telling example, it is no accident that literati appear in the list of suspected criminal Facilitators: Hunt, Shaw, Angleton, Phillips, and Lansdale shoulder their ways to the top of the page.

Perhaps, then, there are opportunities to move the investigation forward by revisiting settled law elements of the case from the perspective of a LeCarre, McCarry, or Deighton (in that order).

Let us reject regurgitation and commit to cogitation.

I have attempted to do just that in my analysis of the so-called Chicago “plot” to assassinate JFK.

It was a starlit and calm night …

***

President Kennedy is scheduled to attend the Army/Air Force football game in Chicago on November 2, 1963. As best as can be discerned, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the U.S Secret Service (SS) — receive two tips alerting them to a plot to assassinate the chief executive as he rides in a motorcade from the airport to the sports stadium. Its route includes a 90-degree turn during passage through a warehouse district with multiple tall buildings.

The tips are said to come from an informant known to history only as “Lee”. The source of a separate tip identifying as an assassin one Thomas Arthur Vallee remains unknown to this day.

The “Lee” tip describes a four-man hit team of “organized, paramilitary assassins”.

On Thursday, October 31, a rooming house landlady reports to law enforcement authorities her discovery of rifles with telescopic sights and a map of the presidential motorcade route laid out on the bed of one of the “organized, paramilitary team’s” members (all four of the Latino suspects were staying at her facility). In response, 24-hour surveillance by the CPD and SS is ordered.

Surveillance is blown when a SS agent follows the vehicle of two men fitting the landlady’s description down a dead-end alley. The suspects turn around and pass the agent, whose window is lowered and the volume of his official radio is turned up. Hearing official chatter, the suspects realize that their cover has been neutralized.

Early the next day, two of the sloppy housekeepers from the “organized, paramilitary team” are picked up and brought to the SS. They never were arrested, and there are no known records of their interrogations — if any were conducted. Are bells ringing?

Now we focus our attention on aspects of the life of Thomas Arthur Vallee — our story’s Lee Harvey Oswald doppelganger.

It seems that Vallee …

Joined the United States Marine Corps in the mid-1950s.
Was assigned to a U-2 base, Camp Otsu, in Japan.
Home in the States, was assigned to recruit and train anti-Castro guerrillas for a return to Cuba, where they will assassinate The Beard.
Held extreme conservative military views.
Owned an M-1 Rifle.
Gained employment in a warehouse building overlooking the presidential motorcade route.

More bells? …

Based on the aforementioned anonymous tip, CPD officers Daniel Groth and Peter Shurla are assigned to follow Vallee, who they are determined to “get off the street.” On the morning of November 2, they get their chance. They pull over Vallee in his white Ford Falcon for a minor traffic violation. They observe a knife on the passenger seat. They arrest Vallee, charge him with unlawful use of a weapon, and proceed to search his vehicle’s trunk. In it they find 750 rounds of M-1 ammunition.

Allegedly under duress, Vallee consents to a search of his home by Groth and Shurla, where sure as shootin’ they discover the M-1. There are no known records of the serial number of Vallee’s weapon ever having been checked.

Two members of the four-man “organized, paramilitary team” remain at large. The threat level is heightened Accordingly, the SS recommends that President Kennedy’s Chicago trip be cancelled. And so it is. The official excuse presented to the public: he must remain in Washington to monitor events in Southeast Asia in the wake of the coup in South Vietnam that resulted in the murders of the Ngo brothers.

Are you sitting down? The two detained members of the “organized, paramilitary team” are released and disappear from history. And it gets better.

Subsequent to the unraveling of the Chicago charade, President Kennedy is allowed to make his previously scheduled trip to New Orleans — even after a “credible” warning of an assassination attempt in the Crescent City had been received, and with the certain knowledge that Chicago’s Modern Assassins Quartet remained at large.

I mention in passing that Thomas Arthur Vallee was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.

James W. Douglass reminds us that a contemporaneous attempt to check Vallee’s auto registration found that it was “frozen,” or classified, and available only to the FBI.

By 1975, Officer Shurla had been elevated to the force’s highest level intelligence unit.

Officer Groth, known to maintain significant intelligence connections, commanded the CPD team that assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Northern Illinois University Professor Dan Stern discovered that Groth received FBI and CIA high-level training, and that the CPD and CIA were “very tight.”

Thus my hypothesis holds that the Chicago charade is suggestive of the storytelling genius of one or more of the assassination conspiracy’s key Facilitators. It was, I submit, a designed doppelganger — crafted in its beyond-coincidence yet superficial mirror images of Dallas plot-related components to function as a bodyguard of lies protecting the one true operation from damage caused by anticipated all-but-inevitable leaks.

Leaked threats of a Dallas hit involving a trained team of assassins shooting the president from a warehouse with the aid of a former Marine who helped control U-2 missions from a secret CIA base in Japan plausibly could be attributed to the alleged Chicago operation and its doppelganger elements.

The results? Chicago was blown, Dallas was secured. Heightened security measures on November 22 were deemed unnecessary.

There simply is no other satisfactory explanation in terms of operational requirements for why Thomas Arthur Vallee, the Chicago patsy, would be so closely modeled on Lee Harvey Oswald. And it must be noted that those similarities, in the case of the alleged Windy City shooter, were paper thin — just close enough to cover Dallas leaks. The deeper elements of Oswald’s background that qualified him to be the “perfect patsy” were absent from the Vallee profile.

And why was a key Chicago charade informant publicly identified as “Lee”?

So does my Chicago hypothesis stand to reason? The late H.P. Albarelli, Jr. may have agreed with me, given his revelation, on page 325 of his A Secret Order: an intelligence officer who declined to be named in the book told him, “It’s a common ploy within the CIA. Sometimes there can be three or four operations in play at one time but only one is actually fully planned and intended to go forward.”

Another bit of admittedly circumstantial evidence must be noted. On what would be the last night of his life, President Kennedy responded to Texas Congressman Henry Gonzalez’s urgent plea for him to cancel his Dallas visit due to active serious threats, with an assurance that I paraphrase: “Don’t worry, Henry. The Secret Service has taken care of it.”

Indeed they had.

To my knowledge, challenges neither to my Doppelganger Gambit nor my Chicago plot hypotheses — nor, for that matter, any challenges to the stale, conventional interpretations of these matters — has been forthcoming

Regurgitators regurgitate.

A final point regarding the post-Chicago career advances of CPD officers Groth and Shurla. Can we detect a pattern developing? A rewards system? Captain William Westbrook of the Dallas Police Department has been linked to the fatal shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit. He later turns up in Laos and involved in CIA actions. Marrell ‘Mac’ McCollough, the Memphis police officer with intelligence connections clearly visible in photos kneeling next to the fallen, fatally wounded Martin Luther King, soon thereafter secured gainful overseas employment with the CIA. The odyssey of Thane Eugene Cesar, who as you will recall was the uniformed security guard positioned directly behind Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated — a journey that delivered Cesar to the Philippines where he comfortably lived out his days — has yet to be fully examined.

Charles R. Drago

Charles R. Drago is an author, screenwriter, jazz critic, media host and festival producer, and radical historian focused on the political assassinations of the 1960s and related deep events. He has lectured and published widely on the latter topics at scholarly conferences and meetings and in scholarly journals throughout the United States.

Mr. Drago contributed the “Introduction” to A Certain Arrogance by George Michael Evica, a book-length investigation of U.S. intelligence manipulations of liberal religious and educational institutions during the Cold War. Professor Evica referred to him as “the conscience of JFK research community.” He is also the author of the “Afterword” to Coup in Dallas, by H.P. Albarelli, Jr..

Mr. Drago is the creator of Autumn Too Long and Phantoms of the 7^th^, limited series for premium cable, and the author of the novel Mairh: A False History, all works in progress.