Don Adams: An FBI Agent Who Didn’t Buy the Official Line
Don Adams, whose career as an FBI agent spanned 22 years, never really bought the official line of his own employer: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
Adams, who died on June 14 at age 83 in Akron, Ohio, eventually wrote From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle (Trine Day, 2012), in which he argued that “the FBI’s investigation was compromised from the top down, beginning with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.”
“I have learned that crucial evidence was withheld from me as an agent investigating a planned assassination of the president, just weeks before it actually took place,” Adams wrote.
“He never believed Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter,” his son, Mark, a career police officer, told the Akron Beacon Journal. “One of his FBI assignments was to investigate a man [Joseph Milteer] who had threatened to assassinate the president who claimed Kennedy would be killed from an office with a high-powered rifle. He found out that the man was in Dallas when the president was shot, but was always puzzled as to why he had limited access to the man.”
In an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal published last year on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Adams, a former chief of the police force on which his son now serves, said he didn’t think Oswald killed President Kennedy and that he was a scapegoat in a conspiracy that reached the highest levels of government.
Adams recalled being shown the Zapruder film shortly after he was transferred to the Dallas FBI office in 1964 and, on seeing Kennedy’s hands go to his throat, remarking that the shot must have come from the front, not from the behind Kennedy’s limousine.
“Don, keep your comments to yourself,” he was told.
This article was originally published on February 1, 2015, on JFKFacts.org.
Bill Hogan