SILVER DOLLAR AND LOOKING GLASS OVER DEALEY PLAZA
A Call
From Out of the Blue – Larry Haapanen and Alan Rogers
JFK
Assassination Chronicles, Volume 8, Issue 2 2002
Available
at Mary Ferrell https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=4275
- relPageId=13
The U.S.
Army’s recruiting campaign touts “An Army of One,” represented by a solitary
soldier performing strenuous feats in a landscape unpopulated by other soldiers.
This
picture comes to mind when considering the activities on November 22, 1963 of
Warrant Officer Edward J. “Ed” Coyle, an Army Intelligence Corps agent assigned
to Region II of the 112th Intelligence Corps Group in Dallas. Out of
approximately thirty military personnel assigned to the Region II office, he
seems to have been “An Army of One” in carrying out the response of Army
Intelligence to the assassination of President Kennedy that day in Dallas, as
described by Coyle in the course of two interviews conducted by the ARRB on
July 29 and October 25, 1996.
On the
morning of November 22, 1963, Coyle attended a meeting with FBI Special Agent
James P. Hosty and ATF Special Agent Frank L. Ellsworth at the ATF office in
downtown Dallas, a meeting that has been decribed elsewhere, e.g., by Hosty in
his book Assignment Oswald (1) and,
in more detai, by Ray and Mary LaFontaine in their book Oswald Talked. (2)
Following
the meeting, Coyle and Hosty walked a short distance to Main Street, the route
of the Presidential motorcade through downtown Dallas, where their subsequent
actions are described differently by each. According to Hosty, they both waited
patiently for the motorcade to pass by, and Coyle was particularly
demonstrative at the sight of President Kennedy, pounding his fist into Hosty’s
shoulder and yelling, “There he is! There’s Kennedy!”
After
the President had passed by, Hosty’s recollection is that he invited Coyle to
join him for lunch, but Coyle had bought a sack lunch, so Hosty took his leave
and went to a nearby restaurant. (3)
Coyule’s
account of this, given in his first ARRB interview, is that he asked Hosty, “Jim,
are you gonna stop and watch the president go by?” but Hosty replied “No,”
mentioned that he needed to go to the bank, and departed before the motorcade
passed.” (4)
The
discrepancy between their recollections is probably insignificant, but it
points up how two different people can racall event quite differently
thirty-plus years later.
Coyle
next went directly back to his office at 902 Rio Grande, in the Rio Grande
Building, where he ran into his boss, Army
Lieutenant Steve Weiss.
[BK
Notes: Also in the Rio Grande building are the offices of the insurance
company where Louis Steven Witt worked. The building reportedly had a cafateria
that all of the companies utilized, where Witt testified that he overheard
others talking about how the umbrella was a symbol of embarrassment to the
Kennedy family as Old Man Joe Kennedy, when Ambassador to the Court of St.
James, sided with Neville Chamberlain – in his appeasement of Hitler. The
umbrella was a symbol associated with Chamberlain, which Witt said gave him the
idea to protest JFK’s appeasement with the Cubans and Moscow by flashing the
umbella to him at Dealey Plaza. As seen in the Zapruder filim, Witt’s umbrella
was probably the last thing he saw before he was killed. And during the Cuban
Missile Crisis it was LeMay who said the blocade and removal of missile without
an invasion was “Munich all over again.” Which makes one woner if it was an
Army Reserve Intelligence officer who planted the idea in Witt’s mind over
lunch in the Rio Grande cafeteria.]
Soon
thereafter, the office AM radio “went blank” and, as they stood wondering what
was happening, the phone rang, the caller being “one of our agents (who) was in
the School Book Depository Building, and he said that the president had been
shot.” [James Powell]
This
agent was told by the Colonel in charge of the Region II office “to make damn
sure” that the president had been shot before saying so. He left the phone, and
then returned with a confirmation, as well as a request that someone bring him
a camera from the supply room, make sure it had film in it, and run it down to
the TSBD. Arriving there to find the building cordoned off by the Dallas
police, Coyle talked to DPD Lieutenant Jack Revilll, pointed out the agent –
who was standing in the doorway – and waited while Revill had somebody take
down his name, phone number and address before allowing him to leave. Coyle
recalled that next, “we stood around there listening to what was going on for a
while, and then we went back up to our office. And we actually had nothing to
do with the investigation at all.” (6)
While it
may not have struck Coyle as relevant to the assassination, he did participate
that afternoon in the unusual scenario of an Army intelligence investigation of
what seems to have been an Air Force communications check.
Fortunally
for students of the JFK assassination, Coyle aplified in his two ARRB interviews
on his follow up of a puzzling incident that happened minutes before President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
A phone call had been received by
the switchboard operator at the Army’s Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. As
recounted later in an Army message.
Between 1215 and 1230 hours, 22
November 1963, Fort Sam Houston telphone office contacted Deputy Chief of Staff
Operations and Training (DSCO&T), Hq Fourth US Army, for guidance
concerning an incoming civilian circuit telephone call to the ‘Silver Dollar’
War Room. Fort Sam Houston telephone operator was furnished Extension No. 2703
where the unidentified caller was connected at 1225 hours, 22 November.
DCSO&T representative on
Extension 2703 replied: “I read you loud and clear, loud and clear.”
The caller then stated: “Roger,
over and out,” and hung up.
The call
sounded like it had come throug a long distance circuit. (7)
Kennedy
assassination researchers who puzzled over this report had little to go on
until 1999, when Alan Rogers obtained copies of the two ARRB interviews
conducted with Ed Coyle and found that they contained references to “Silver
Dollar.”
In his
first ARRB interview, Coyle recounted that after returning to the Region II
offices from the TSBD, he and his fellow agents spent the remainder of the day
looking at their files in search of “any sickos” who might be responsible for
the assassination.
Then,
without prompting from his interviewer, but apparently thinking that it was
significant, Coyle volunteered the information that:
“There
was one instrument that came up that I later turned out to be quite embarrassed
by. “
“Somebody
down at Fourth Army headquarters had gotten a code word named ‘SILVER DOLLAR,’
and they claimed that they didn’t know what it was. And they asked me to check
with the FBI and Secret Service to find out what ‘Silver Dollar’ meant.”
“And I
turned around, and I went to these guys and I couldn’t get anything out of
them."
“I
finally wound up going out to the Army Nike Missile unit in the area. And I
went out to them, and I asked them and they said, “Yes we do know what it was,”
and they took me into their – they had a kind of like a war room out there –
and the code word “SILVER DOLLAR” meant….to
the billet this was a signal that Air Force Two was in the air and operating,
and that all of this meant….4th Army headquarters didn’t know! I had to go to
the Nike Missle site for them to know exactly.” (8)
In his
decond interview, Coyle again brought up his “Silver Dollar” investigation. He
added little to what was in the first interview, execept that this time his
interviewer asked him what “Silver Dollar” meant, and Coyle replied: “It meant
that Air Force Two was in the air.
In other words, when something happened to the President of the United States
and Air Force One was down, there were certain procedures that went into effect
that put the people who would be in charge of the country in the air and safe,
so that we could – you know, there would be no assassination attempt on them.
And when I found that out, I said – 4th Army headquarters should have know what
that was. (9)
We thus
have Ed Coyle to thank for injecting into his two ARRB interviews an
explanation for the “Silver Dollar” code word. As it turns out (and on this
point, Coyle’s explanation was somewhat garbled), “Silver Dollar” referred to the specially fitted U.S. Air Force KC-135s
(The USAF equilvanent of the Boeing 707) that served as the National Emergency
Airborne Command Post (NEACAP, also known as “Kneecap”).
Since
1962, NEACAP has been one of the several places of refuage that the so-called
National Command Authority, including in particular the President, might repair
to in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. (10)
The
Coyle interviews left another question unanswered. Did the phone call that came
into Fort Sam Houston minutes before President Kennedy was assassinated
originate with the “Silver Dollar” aircraft, or simply use the code word?
In 1999,
Larry Haapanen obtained from the National Archives a copy of the flight report
that was filed on a seemingly routine training mission of a NEACAP that took
place on November 22, 1963. The report indicated that “Silver Dollar” did,
indeed, send a communications to Foruth Army at some unspecified point during
the flight, which lasted from 10:40 AM to 2:30 PM (Dallas time) with only a
simulated command authority aboard. The report said that the result was “excellent”
on the call to Fourth Army, indicating that it went through with no technical
problems. (11)
The
recipients of the “Silver Dollar” phone call to Fourth Army reported that the
call came over an “incoming civilian circuit.” That, plus the fact that they
seem to have no diea of the meaning of “Silver Dollar,” suggest a strange
confusion on their part.
The “Silver
Dollar” aircraft typically made a series of conference calls to various
components of the Armed Forces as well as a number of individual calls while on
each training mission, as shown by the flight reports of six other NEACAP
training flights that were made in November 1963, and a number of Army
headquarters was called on at least one of the other training flights that
month ( Sixth Army, called on November 1, 1963) (12)
On November 22, 1963, the
training flight took “Silver Dollar” from Andrews Air Force Base to a point 60
miles north of Philadelphia, and its conference calls were made via “Waldorf,”
which was the location (in Maryland) of an American Telephone and Telegraph
facility.
According
to an unofficial internet source, Waldorf
“is the hub for one of AT&T’s leading well-known telecommunications
services, the U.S. Air Force’s wideband ground entry system, known as Combat
Ciders.
This and
a similar system known as Presidential
provide multi-line air-to-ground connectivity for the NEACAP, Looking Glass,
and other airborne command posts and Air Force One and other VIP aircraft to
ensure communications for the National Command Authorities.” (13)
At the
time of the JFK assassination, the
Defense Department’s highly secure AUTOVON communications system had not yet
gone into service (it was inaugurated in December 1963). (14)
[BK Notes AUTOVON might be
connected to the Project Four Leaves NSAM that JFK signed on Sept. 23, 1963
placing the hightest national security priority to developing this miltiary
communications system.]
Air-to-ground
calls made from NEACAP and other Post Attack Command and Control System
aircraft used UHF voice multiplex communications equipment, and those calls
were then rounted to their destinations using AT&T landlines. According to
a technical document submitted in December 1963, tests on the system had “shown
a channel quality similar to that of a typical long distance phone call,” (15)
and, if that were true with the “Silver Dollar” calls made on November 22,
1963, it seems plausible that such a call to Fourth Army Headquarters could
have been misidentified as a long distance phone call coming in over a civilian
phone line. This assumes, of course, that Fourth Army was ignorant of the
meaning of “Silver Dollar.”
On the
face of it, what appears to have happened is that following the assassination,
someone at Fourth Army headquarters became concerned about the “Silver Dollar”
call (not such a preposterous suspicion, given the timing) and set out to
discover what “Silver Dollar” might be. Oddly, they either ignored operational
channels or found them to be of no help, and turned instead to intelligence
channels to make their inquiries.
The word
was passed to the 112th Intellience Corps at Fort Sam Houston, which contacted
the Region II office in Dallas, and, as a “street agent” whose assignment
inclued liaison with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, Ed Coyle was detained
to make inquiries in Dallas. Coyle got nowhere with the FIB and Secret Service
(although one would think that the latter group would know about “Silver Dollar”),
and he then went to the Army Nike Base outside Dallas. At that time, the Army
Air Defense Command (ARADOCOM) had its 64th Group based at Camp Wolter in
Mineral Springs, Texas, with subordinate NIKE battalions located in the Dallas,
Austin, and Abiline metropolitan areas. (16)
NIKE
ground-to-air missile personnel would presumably know about “Silver Dollar” because
of their responsibility for air defense (t wouldn’t be prudent to shoot down
the President’s plane by mistake during a nuclear war)), and Coyle was able to
get an exlanation of “Silver Dollar” from the NIKE battalion. Precisely what
Coyle did with the information is not clear from his ARRB interviews, although
we may presume that it was passed to Ft. Sam Houston.
Larry
Haapanen wrote to Coyle about the “Silver Dollar” incident in 1999 and offered
to share copies of relevant documents, but received no reply.
Coyle
was transferred by the Army from Dallas to South Korea in 1964, and finished
out his Army careeer in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was there that he died on June
20, 2000. (17)
One more part of the “Silver
Dollar” puzzle is the question of how the Dallas Police Department became
involved. The description of the incident quoted at the beginning of this
article comes from an unclassified message sent on November 26, 1963, by the
Commanding Officer of the 112th Intelligence Corps Group at Fort Sam Houston to
the Commander of Region II in Dallas. It makes reference to a “Dallas City
Police request for information concerning “Silver Dollar” communications
messages, and closes with an instruction that the information about he call “may
be released only verbally and informally to Dallas Police in response to their
request.” (18)
We have no other documentation to
indicate how and when the DPD learned of the call or why they inquired about
it. One possible scenario is that Dallas Police officers who were Army
Intelligence reservists found out about the call from contacts in the Region II
office in Dallas.
In his second ARRB interview,
Coyle recalled that “we were on very close terms with the Dallas Police
Department, particularly their intelligence section.
Now their intelligence section
was run by an Army reserve colonel. I don’t remember his name right now. But
all of the men assigned to his organization were in Army Intelligence.” (19)
This
very revealing description of the relationship between Region II and the DPD
suggests that it might have been fairly easy for some knowledge of the “Silver
Dollar” call to pass from one to the other. It does not fully explain, however,
why DPD personnel took an interest in the call, given that it occurred outside
their jurisdiction, nor is it specific about the timing of the PD’s request for
information.
One
final word should be said abou the flight report filed after the NEACAP
training mission of November 22, 1963. The report is dated “27 Nov. 63, the
five day lag time being unusual when compared to the typical 1-2 days for the
flight reports on the other six November missions. This is explained by the
last line of the report:
“NOTE
CORRECTION OF AFIN 35336, 22 Nov”
In other
words, the flight report numbered AFIN 38465 has been “corrected” in some
unspecified way from the original report
filed on the day of the flight (20)
An FOIA
request submitted in 1999 received a reply from the National Archives
indicating that neither they nor the Department of Defense were able to locate
the original report and that an official at the latter agency had suggested
that it was possible that the initial flight report was destroyed after the
corrected one was received.
The
flight report gives the names of the two non-crew passengers on the flight, one
from AT&T and one from the Army, but they have both died, and, as with the
other November 1963 flight reports, names are not given of any of the crew
members. Finding ourselves unable to interview any of the personnel involved,
on the ground or in the air, we are left with only a meager paper trail from
which to reconstruct the “Silver Dollar” incident, but we would be hard pressed
to do so at all without Ed Coyle’s ARRB interviews.
FOOTNOTES
To Support
JFKCountercoup
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