1973 New Orleans Tower Sniper--Was it a Black Op?

[Rolf Zaeschmar]

Hale Boggs

After the New Year's Eve attack on the NOPD, the police search for the sniper was complicated by a gathering of VIPs in New Orleans on January 4, 1973 for a memorial service for Congressman Hale Boggs(D-La.), 58, who was declared to be legally deceased the day before, after his plane went missing on a campaign flight in Alaska on October 16, 1972. Also on the small chartered plane was Alaskan Congressman Nick Begich(D-Al) 40, his aide Russell Brown, 37 and pilot Don Jonz, 38. Despite a huge search and rescue operation(the largest ever for its time) no trace of the plane or its passengers and crew was ever found.



Boggs(on the left)


Boggs and Begich




http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Hale-Boggs
House Resolution 1 of January 3, 1973 officially recognized Boggs' presumed death and opened the way for a special election.

Boggs was House Majority Leader, the second most powerful position in the House and appeared destined to be elected the next Speaker of the House. Present at the service were First Lady Patricia Nixon, and ex-President Lyndon Johnson and his family, among other notables. Boggs had been making waves by getting into a public feud with J. Edgar Hoover:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Boggs
In April 1971 he made a speech on the floor of the House in which he strongly attacked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the whole of the FBI.

http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2010/02...d-usa.html
"Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance." Hale Boggs -- Speech before Congress (April 22, 1971)

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....topic=3080
Author Anthony Summers described Boggs' speeches against Hoover in the 1993 book, "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover." According to Summers, Boggs "made speeches accusing the FBI of wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating the universities." Boggs also compared Hoover's FBI to the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo. Boggs said the Attorney General should "ask for the resignation of Mr. Hoover." (Summers, page 394)

Hoover


Boggs had also been a member of the Warren Commission, but he was rumored to have doubts about the conclusions reached by that body.

Warren Commission


http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....amp;page=2
The Los Angeles Star, on November 22, 1973, reported that before his death Boggs claimed he had "startling revelations" on Watergate and the assassination of JFK.

Hoover had died five weeks before Boggs' plane went down, but it was clear that Hoover was not the only one who had growing doubts about Boggs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Boggs
... a conversation on April 6, 1971, between then-President Richard M. Nixon and the Republican minority leader, Gerald R. Ford, Jr., in which Nixon said that he could no longer take counsel from Boggs as a senior member of Congress. In the recording of this call, Nixon is heard to ask Ford to arrange for the House delegation to include an alternative to Boggs.

http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Hale-Boggs
Some, including several of Begich's children, have suggested that Richard Nixon had a hand in Boggs' death in order to thwart the Watergate investigation.

Good interview with Dr. Nick Begich, the missing Alaskan congressman's son:



postscript:
Lindy Boggs, the widow of Hale Boggs, would go on to win the special election for his seat. She was later awarded an ambassadorship under the Bill Clinton administration. It was a young Bill Clinton who would drive Hale Boggs to an airport in Texas for a flight back to DC, where he got on another plane for the flight to Alaska. Call it coincidence.