Newly released documents reveal two U.S. soldiers overheard JFK assassination plan; committed to mental institutions

Fellowship of the Minds – by Dr. Eowyn

One of the transparency-promoting things President Trump did was to make public some previously-withheld documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

As described by the National Archives, while the majority (88%) of the JFK Assassination Records has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the newly-released documents include FBI, CIA, and other agency documents. The releases to date are as follows:  

• July 24, 2017: 3,810 documents (read press release)
• October 26, 2017: 2,891 documents (read press release)
• November 3, 2017: 676 documents (read press release)
• November 9, 2017: 13,213 documents (read press release)
• November 17, 2017: 10,744 documents (read press release)
• December 15, 2017: 3,539 documents (read press release)
• April 26, 2018: 18,731 documents (read press release)

Note: One of the JFK documents that was released in 1997 is the stunning revelation of a very real U.S. government conspiracy called Operation Northwoods.

Dr. Jerry Kroth, an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University in California, combed through the recently released JFK assassination documents and found something curious — two U.S. soldiers had separately overheard plans to assassinate President Kennedy and were committed to mental institutions for reporting what they’d heard. The two soldiers were Private First Class Eugene V. Dinkin and Sergeant David Christensen.

Kroth describes what happened to Dinkin and Christensen in an article for Information Clearing House on July 11, 2018. The article is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Coup d’etat: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

(1) PRIVATE FIRST CLASS EUGENE V. DINKIN

Private First Class Eugene Dinkin was a U.S. Army cryptographic code operator stationed in Metz, France. In early November 1963, three weeks before the JFK assassination, Dinkin intercepted—or decoded— two messages about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. The messages contained three names: French/Corsican assassin Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey.

Note: In 2007, in his deathbed confession that then-VP Lyndon B. Johnson and the CIA had conspired to assassinate President Kennedy, former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt mentioned two of the three names Dinkin had intercepted.

PFC Dinkin had a friend mail a letter to Robert Kennedy, warning him that an assassination attempt on his brother would occur in Texas on about November 28, and that a communist or a “negro” would be blamed for the murder.

Doubting that the letter would ever reach Robert Kennedy, Dinkin went AWOL from his unit on November 4, 1963. He entered Switzerland using forged travel orders and a false Army identification card. On November 6, he appeared in the Press Room of the United Nations in Geneva and told reporters he was being persecuted, that “they” were plotting against President Kennedy, and that “something” would happen in Dallas.

On November 13, Dinkin was arrested by the U.S. military, placed in a psychiatric hospital, and later transferred to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC, where he underwent psychological tests before eventually being released six months later.

Dinkin’s allegation reached the White House on November 29, and went to the Warren Commission in April of 1964. Neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission ever investigated the Dinkin case.

Sources: Information Clearing House and Mary Ferrell Foundation

(2) SERGEANT DAVID CHRISTENSEN

David Christensen was a U.S. Air Force sergeant stationed at an RAF base in Kirknewton, Scotland. The base had a relationship with the CIA and was used by the CIA as a top-secret listening station.

Just before November 1963, Sgt. Christensen intercepted a communication that an assassination attempt would be made on President Kennedy. According to Jerry Kroth, “Christensen heard something he shouldn’t have heard, and he heard it in a top-secret CIA listening post. As you can probably guess, Sgt. Christensen, like Eugene Dinkin, was summarily ‘committed to a mental institution.’”

Kroth writes:

One should raise an important question here as with all of these released documents: why were they withheld for half a century? Clearly, if two psychotic persons ranted off about the President being killed—and both properly confined to mental institutions as deranged —such stories would merely constitute tabloid pulp and not rise above the level of the National Enquirer. The fact that these stories never graced our supermarkets, but were withheld from the public and from scholars for five decades is certainly worth more than a raised eyebrow.

Two code operators, in secret American military installations, quite independently of each other—and both obviously with clearances—discovered chatter, decidedly secret chatter, about the coming assassination of the President of the United States. If taken seriously, it meant a deep conspiracy was afoot involving high level government and military plotters, not little Lee Harvey who was sorting textbooks in the Texas School Book Depository for $1.25 an hour.

In order to preserve the Warren Commission myth that a single, lone assassin shot the President required—absolutely and irrevocably—that such news be hidden, covered up, and sequestered from any public awareness—and indeed it was. Frankly, it is a miracle these files survived at all considering their significance.

See also “Dallas doctors who attended to JFK say he had a bullet entry wound on his front neck“.

~Eowyn

Fellowship of the Minds