Did Tosh Plumlee Try to Abort the JFK Assassination?
- Fred Litwin
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
Tosh Plumlee was one of the main characters in Rob Reiner's podcast series, Who Killed JFK?
Here is an excerpt from a transcript from the episode, Strange Bedfellows: (35:18)
Rob Reiner: Wait till you hear the roster of people who arrived in Dallas that morning. First up, we have Tosh Plumlee, who was a CIA operative and a mercenary pilot during the 50s and 60s. As you may recall, he was stationed at Nags Head, North Carolina, with Oswald. The day of the assassination, Plumlee was tasked with transporting two high-profile people to Dallas.
Tosh Plumlee: I was asked to go fly as co-pilot on that particular flight.
Rob Reiner: That's Plumlee.
Tosh Plumlee: The flight was to go from West Palm Beach to go over to Tampa, and we flew open water across to New Orleans, and some other people got on there at New Orleans, and then from there, we flew into Dallas,
Rob Reiner: Plumlee, like everyone else was on a need to know basis, and doesn't claim to know why he was piloting the flight, but he confirmed that one of the passengers on board was mob boss Johnny Roselli.
Tosh Plumlee: Roselli was on board our aircraft. So was a couple other Cubans. I don't know for sure who they are.
Rob Reiner: There was one other passenger, Plumlee could confirm
Tosh Plumlee: His name was Howard Hunt.
Rob Reiner: Hunt was a high level American intelligence officer, and as we know, became infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in.
Plumlee was also mentioned in the episode Who Killed JFK? Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (8:26)
Rob Reiner: Now, some people think there were two shooters. Some people think as many as six. But based on the forensic evidence, the locations of the wounds, and the directions of the shots, we believe there were at least four. There was definitely a shooter on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository building. There was another shooter behind the picket fence on what we've come to call the grassy knoll. Based on the bullet hole in Kennedy's back, as some of Governor Connally's wounds, there were most likely shooters in the Dal-Tex building and the County Records building. Both of these buildings were across Houston Street behind the motorcade. And finally, based on the forensic evidence we have, we believe that a fatal head shot would have come from the overpass on the south knoll.
Tosh Plumlee: So we were on the south side, and we were looking for shooters on the other side.
Soledad O'Brien: That's Tosh Plumlee, the CIA mercenary pilot who said he flew mobster Johnny Roselli and CIA agent E. Howard Hunt to Dallas that day,
Rob Reiner: Plumlee was positioned on the south knoll of Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting. He said a shot definitely came from that area. And based on the position Kennedy was in at the time and the result of his head wound, we believe this was a kill shot.
Reiner says that Plumlee did not know why he was piloting the flight. But, Plumlee provided more details in this 1992 interview: (Thanks to Dave Perry for sending me this document)
Plumlee claims he was running guns for Castro.
Johnny Roselli was on the supposed flight to Dallas along with "a couple of other Cubans and people that were connected with organized crime in New Orleans." Notice that Plumlee says nothing about flying E. Howard Hunt to Dallas.
Plumlee says that "our objective there on the Plaza was to go in and be spotters, to try to stop cross-triangulation gunfire on an ambush. We had people that filtrated out into the Plaza and the object there was to get next to anyone that possibly could have been a shooter and take'em out." He thought there would be three shooter teams -- each team would have a spotter, a shooter and a breakdown man. So they were "looking for 3 on the South Knoll, 3 on the upper knoll, and some in the buildings."
Plumlee had earlier in the interview claimed that the CIA were their "support people" for this flight, and "making arrangements" for them.
Gee, if the CIA wanted to stop the assassination, why not just abort the motorcade rather than having Plumlee and his team search the Plaza right as the motorcade was passing by?
In the last question on this page, Plumlee says that "whether the team that I flew in was a combination of the abort team or the shooter team, I have no way of knowing. It could have been a combination of both or it could have been a complete 100% abort team, I don't know."
What?
These people might have part of the "shooter team." And he doesn't really know?
Plumlee doesn't say one word about E. Howard Hunt in this interview.
Here is the supposed FAA flight plan:
Here is the write-up by former CIA operative John Stockwell from a meeting with Plumlee in Dallas in 1990:
Plumlee tells Stockwell that he has been unjustly jailed several times, and that "some of his jail record, he says, was in fact cover for military intelligence black operations that were being run from a building that was beside a jail."
Plumlee had coffee with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1959?
Captain Will Fritz was "deeply involved in the plot."
Alex Ho (aka A. Kitman Ho) was in this meeting I would imagine representing Oliver Stone. Ho asked Plumlee was his sources were and Plumlee replies that "he would go into greater detail when he had an understanding (a deal).
I have to love Plumlee's theory -- "he tried very hard to explain a theory that they had used three lamp posts to line up a "triangulation" which the shooters would all use to mark the kill zone." Marrs realized this was "gibberish" and then "generously tried to help this theory by pointing out that four lampposts could have been used to form a box which would have been quadrisected."
The assessment is correct:
It must be noted that such people spent half their lives in bars and become notoriously adept at sea stories. There is nothing in all that he said that could not have been gleaned in reading and following the assassination newspaper articles and books over the years ..."
I don't think Stockwell ever succeeded in getting Plumlee's account "submitted to a voice stress analysis."
You can tell that Plumlee reads a lot of assassination books. Jesse Ventura wrote in his 2013 book, They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK, that he received an email in May 2013, from Plumlee about Eugene Dinkin:
Tosh Plumlee confirmed he believes it was Dinkin's message that was the intelligence actually responsible for sending the Military intelligence abort team mission into Dallas on November 22:
It was because of Dinkin's info on November 8, 1963, that the Military Intelligence Abort Team was sent to Dallas to abort the hit.
A melding of two ridiculous conspiracy stories. At least it's creative, no?
Coming up: Plumlee steals a plane and writes some bad checks.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Tosh Plumlee
Plumlee writes to Palamara that Dinkin's messages might have been the intelligence to send the abort team to Dallas.
PBS Frontline investigated Plumlee's allegations about Nags Head, North Carolina and could not corroborate any part of his story