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Officer William H.(Joe) Cooper & JFK's Murder
#1
Officer William H. (Joe) Cooper Saved a Vice President from assassination, but wound up dead after investigating J.F.K's Murder

Joe spent most of a decade tracking down possible links connecting the assassination of President Kennedy to the government intelligence network, particularly Naval Intelligence, ONI..

His investigation lasted till Oct.16, 1974, when 50 year old Cooper was found shot to death in his apartment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His death was ruled a suicide, but his wife and family and friends were convinced he was murdered. He enjoyed living too much, and only a few days before had called, newsman John Moulder, excited with what he considered new angles in his Naval Intelligence theory…

Moulder had met Cooper the summer of 74, when they were tracking down and interviewed two men who said they had been offered a bundle of money ….and had turned it down…….to fly two men from Dallas to Latin America on Nov. 22/63..the day the President was killed..

Joe Cooper, working for government intelligence had headed off a plot to assassinate Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
The V.P.'s assassination conspiracy was carried out in Louisiana, where Jim Garrison said the conspiracy to kill J.F.K was hatched…

Cooper had filled Moulder in on the details during three separate interviews in the Baton Rouge area. The plot was begun by members of what Joe described as……. " the old original Ku Klux Klan" although, he did not have any solid evidence to indicate the conspiracy was an official Klan action. A former Baron Rouge policeman, Cooper was a paid informer for the F.B.I from 1963 to 65...

He attended Klan meetings in abandoned houses in the woods, abandoned buildings in town, private homes. One meeting was even held in a barn.
"My government contact encouraged me to take part in Klan activities" said Cooper… "The Klan would sometimes beat somebody up, fire gunshots into somebody's house. Intimidate integrated restaurants. Once 25 of us drove cars up and down the street all night long in front of an integrationist's house to intimidate him".
"The police didn't try to stop us. Hell, members of the Klan included state troopers, policemen and deputy sheriffs…

Cooper learned of the plot to assassinate V.P.Hubert Humphrey when he appeared before the Louisiana AFL-CIO state convention in Baton Rouge on April 9, 1965..Cooper was a member of the KBI…..the Klan Bureau of Investigation, the Klan's answer to the FBI.

As a FBI contact, Cooper had the code name ….."Lyons Bucks"….Which he used when he phoned his FBI contact to report on Klan activities. When he signed receipts for payments from the FBI, he used his real name. A fellow clan member had come to him and told him of the plan to assassinate the V.P. The member asked Cooper if he could use his intelligence contacts with the police to find out how much security would be used for Humphrey's visit. He also told Cooper the name of the man who was to be his back-up man...

Cooper immediately called his government contact. He met with the federal agent in a car near the campus of Louisiana State University.
Carrying out his instructions, he returned to his fellow Klansmen and reported the security along the route of the motorcade that Humphrey would be traveling would be heavy. He told the Klan that he did not know how heavy it would be at the Jack Tar Capital House Hotel, where the V.P was to speak...

The FBI instructed Cooper to stay away from the Hotel the night Humphrey would arrive. That night, the Klansman-spy was with other Klan members scattering anti Humphrey literature around the Louisiana State University campus. Meanwhile the Secret Service who were responsible for his safety ….urged him to cancel the trip to Baton Rouge..

Since Louisiana Governor John J. McKeithen was going to be with him at all times on the visit, Humphrey insisted on making the trip. The Secret Service sought the co-operation of Victor Bussie, president of the State AFL-CIO, a friend of Humphrey's. Cooper had also heard that an effort would also be made to assassinate Bussie. His home was bombed two years later...
Cooper was able to supply the FBI with the names of the two men involved in the attempt on Humphrey's life. Agents, using miniature cameras, obtained pictures of the two men, but didn't arrest them before Humphrey's visit, in case others would be sent in their place..

On the night of the Humphrey appearance at the hotel, the ball room was filled with FBI-Secret Service undercover agents and trusted union men serving as sergeants at arms. The entrance to the ballroom was arranged that all visitors could be observed..... Therefore the triggerman was spotted immediately, he was a union member and had a ticket to the event..... The undercover men serving as sergeants-at-arms escorted the man to a seat in the rear at the ballroom. Two FBI sat down in front of him, SS men on both sides, and two others sat behind the man.... Humphrey arrived in Baton Rouge and rode with the governor in a limousine to his mansion. Later they rode together to the hotel, security were everywhere along the route, they covered the route with high powered rifles from the roof tops…Humphrey and McKeithen arrived at the hotel, entered the ballroom, and walked to the speaker's platform.....
The gunman stood, a gun was tucked in his belt under his coat….federal agents grabbed him and pulled him out a kitchen door, the second man on the team was also grabbed and pulled from the room. He had no gun on him, but there was a gun in his car parked outside. From these men the Feds learned the name of a third man, who was in on the scheme, but he had left the convention hall, and backed out before Humphrey had arrived........ The men were questioned, but were never charged the FBI told him there was not sufficient evidence. Cooper said they handled everything so smoothly no one at the hall knew of an attempt, he said they had wanted to kill Humphrey because he was an integrationist…..
No word leaked out about the assassination plot until two years later when the New Orleans States Item printed part of the story. They described an attempt on Humphrey's life by a "right-wing organization" but did not mention the Klan, and of course there was no mention of Cooper nor anyone involved..

Within a few years all three men were dead. One was shot to death by his wife. Another was killed when a metal door fell on him. The third, a young man died of a heart attack. …..Cooper was paid an average of $200.00 a month as a federal informer. People close to Cooper knew of his effort in the Humphrey case.."There is absolutely no question in my mind that Joe saved Hubert Humphrey's life", Cooper's lawyer, Emile W. Weber, told reporter Moulder after Cooper's death.

Four months before Joe Cooper's death, the ex-policeman, ex-government intelligence man, private detective, assassination researcher, wrote to Moulder with information about the Klan and similar right-wing organizations....... "There are a few of these birds left in Baton Rouge and in Mississippi that would kill me", he noted "I have ridden with some of the bad ones and know what they can and will do"…..Cooper explained how groups such as the KKK and the American Nazi Party have been infiltrated by the various governmental intelligence agencies." ....The FBI, CIA, the IRS and the Secret Service may each have representatives in a single group…all the spies unknown to each other," he said......The disclosures that came about since Watergate proved that Cooper was not exaggerating.

Example: The New York Times disclosed on May 20, 1973, that one of the most militant outspoken members of the radical Weatherman organization during it's peak period of bombing and other violence …Larry Grantwohl of Cincinnati…..was a informer and agent provocateur of the FBI.
In 1966 the year after the Humphrey plan, the House Un-American Activities Committee in Ohio was hearing testimony that an Ohio "grand empress" of the Ku Klux Klan, had plotted to kill both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson…The Warren Commission also reveals other bits and pieces of threats by Klan members against Kennedy that had come to Federal Agencies shortly before Kennedy's death.
..
But by this time, Joe Cooper was off on his own Kennedy conspiracy investigation by then……and his efforts involved Naval Intelligence, not necessarily the Far Right civilian groups.

The Detective had begun a project that would last nine years, until he was found shot to death in his apartment on Oct.16, 1974….
Putting together huge packets of strange coincidences he felt pointed to Naval Intelligence being involved in the J.F.K. assassination. At the time of Kennedy's Presidency, Cooper was against his Civil Rights policies as a typical Southerner of that time.
But his political views were tempered by a strong sense of patriotism and an instinct as a top researcher and investigator.
"I love my country, but this was not the way to change it….by killing a President", he said. Cooper was convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald, that the W/C said alone was responsible for Kennedy's death, was a Naval Intelligence agent....... Cooper was an ex-Navy man who had received a citation when his ship, the U.S.S Smith, was rammed by a kamikaze pilot in 1942, killing 58 men...... He picked up his investigatory knowledge as a Baton Rouge policeman for almost 10 years and later as a law enforcement officer in two Florida towns.

He became convinced a week long cruise aboard the aircraft carrier Shangri La in August 1963…..three months before Kennedy's death …involved an intelligence operation. As a policeman in Florida he began making written enquiries to the Pentagon to find out the names of those aboard the carrier. He received 9 names, but two turned out to be aliases...
He continued to press the Navy Department for more information on the two mystery men. Meanwhile, he left Florida and returned to Louisiana.
"A Naval Intelligence agent followed me from Florida to Baton Rouge to find out how I got this information," he said..
The Shangri La cruise, billed as a pleasure junket, was sponsored by then Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth of Fort Worth..... Korth knew Oswald's family before the youthful onetime Russian defector was arrested for killing Kennedy, and subsequently then murdered by Jack Ruby.
As an attorney, Korth had represented Edwin Ekdahl, former husband of Oswald's mother, in a divorce suit....

Korth succeeded Kennedy appointee John B. Connally, as Secretary of the Navy…After the assassination, the names of both Korth and Connally were found in Oswald's address book…….A month before the assassination, Korth resigned his cabinet post during the political controversy over the TFX fighter plane, which was used in the Vietnam war.. General Dynamics in Korth's hometown, Fort Worth, finally received the $6.5 Billion TFX contract after Lyndon Baines Johnson became President..

The seven Shangri La guests the Navy identified for Cooper were business or political leaders in the New Orleans-Baton Rouge area.
One had worked for the same insurance company with Lee Harvey Oswald's father...... Another was a close friend of Dallas law enforcement officials who investigated Kennedy's assassination. Another had connections with a local Nazi leader..

Oswald had some interest in the Nazis...... The names of George Lincoln Rockwell and Daniel Burros, both Nazi Party leaders, were written in his address book. Both Rockwell and Burros were later shot to death….Rockwell assassinated by an ex-Marine, Burros death ruled a suicide.
The two names on the Shangri La list that Cooper couldn't identify were Adolph Vermont Jr. and William Craver Jr. After being referred from one department to another, finally the Pentagon told him the information couldn't be found in the files and there was no way to track it down.
In his research…..the significance of which may never be determined…hekept running across the name "Vermont" time and again.
He wrote to Moulder "When the records are released in 2039 you will see the "Vermont" project was involved in killing Kennedy"….

In 1968 when Cooper was chasing the Naval Intelligence theory, he got in touch with D.A Jim Garrison's staff probing the Kennedy assassination. On July 9, 1968, he was asked to testify before the New Orleans Parish grand jury. Five days later, the steering post came loose on his auto and it crashed into a culvert. The detective's back was broken in three places. His wife had a serious head injury, Cooper said he never believed it was an accident.

In 1974 Moulder and Cooper located two men in Baton Rouge who had once been friends but hadn't seen each other in several years. They had worked together at the sprawling Ling-Temco-Vought defense factory plant in Dallas in Nov, 1963....
Both men, in separate interviews, said they had been offered a large sum of money to pilot a small aircraft with two passengers to South America on Nov. 22nd…..Both men said they had turned down the offer because the flight would be in a no-questions-asked basis and they feared it involved something illegal...

The proposed pilot, Billy Kemp, 52, told Moulder .."After the assassination, I was glad I didn't have anything to do with it"….Both men said that since Kennedy was killed in Dallas the day of the proposed flight, they felt it was linked to the assassination. Both Kemp, a decorated WW 11 fighter pilot, and his former partner told Moulder the name of the man, also a LTV employee, who made the offer.
Kemp said they were never told the destination of the proposed flight "but only that it was some South American country"....
He feared the occupants of the plane might be arrested on the spot if they attempted an unscheduled landing in a Latin American country.

Another coincidence: Kemp was married in 1963 to Maxine Kemp, an employee of the Louisiana State Mental Hospital at Jackson.
Mrs. Kemp was a witness in Garrison's investigation. She said that Lee Harvey Oswald went to the hospital and filled out a job application ……which had since disappeared….in August of 1963…

Kemp's Partner said the fee for the flight was to be $25,000……and that he concluded Kennedy might be murdered after reading in a newspaper the President would be in Dallas on Nov.22, the day of the proposed flight.
"I said, " Billy do you know what they want for $25,000? I said, Kennedy ain't gonna get out of Dallas. They're gonna kill him"..
Kemp's partner agreed to an interview only if his name was not used…

Two months later in 1974 Cooper was found shot to death in his bedroom.

After Cooper's death John Moulder went back to the Baton Rouge businessman who wanted to remain anonymous.The businessman held him to his commitment to also not print his name..
In a packet of notes that Moulder received in the mail from Cooper the day before his death, he noted that the stories in the Tattler, after two other stories had appeared in issues in Aug. 74,( which I do not have) had some people in Baton Rouge " stirred up"..
Then his death reminded Moulder of the other mysterious deaths concerning the witnesses and others involved in some way with the J.F.K assassination, and of what Cooper had written to him in a letter the previous summer…

"I am convinced everyone involved will be killed if this thing is not exposed quickly"…..

Information from

John Moulder…….The National Tattler June 8, 1975…….

The only other mention I have found re Joe, is that he at one time was working on proving a voting scam in Louisiana,
and did so.....and also ran for Sheriffs Office I believe, but lost out....at election time.
On Mae Russells site, as well as in the Penn Jones mysterious death article, it states that he was shot with the wrong
hand...but nothing further, will check the Jones books...that I have....
Nothing available on him, at Mary Farrells site..either.....so... Until.....

Bernice…


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Officer William H.(Joe) Cooper & JFK's Murder - by Bernice Moore - 06-04-2011, 10:39 PM

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