Back Story #3, Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman took the photograph on the book’s cover, a fact that obviously pleases him.  In 1963, Moe was an FBI agent in Tampa, Florida.  My first contact with him was a phone call to ask if he remembered his 1964 investigation of Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban-American who had lived in Tampa. Moe's investigation determined that on November 17, Lopez had been at a Fair Play for Cuba meeting, expecting a phone call from Cuba to give him the go-ahead to travel there.  He left Tampa on November 20.  He was next seen on the night of Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, crossing the border from Texas into Mexico at Laredo.  He then traveled to Mexico City and flew to Havana on the night of November 27 as the only passenger on a Cubana Airlines flight.  Mexican authorities told the CIA that they thought Lopez had been involved in the assassination.  At the request of FBI headquarters, Moe filed several reports which contain about all that is known about Lopez.

            In calling Moe, I had hoped that he  could tell me more than was in his FBI reports.  Alas, he said this was just one of hundreds of investigations he had done.  Indeed, he didn’t remember anything until I sent him copies of his declassified reports from the National Archives.  But his memory was certain about one thing: He was never told that the interest in Lopez stemmed from allegations he was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

            Once we finished discussing Lopez, Moe wanted to talk about President Kennedy’s visit to Tampa on Monday November 18.  The Secret Service had tasked the FBI office in Tampa with helping with security.  Kennedy was going to give a talk at the baseball stadium there, and the Secret Service wanted FBI agents posted around the stadium.  Moe was near first base where Kennedy’s car would exit.  It was the same car and same driver, Moe says, that were in Dallas four days later.

            The FBI expected both anti-Castro and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators at the event.  Since it didn’t have photographs of supporters of these groups, the Tampa FBI office instructed its agents to bring their own cameras to photograph the demonstrators.  None showed up, so Moe took pictures of the president, including the one on the book’s cover with Kennedy standing up in the car as he exited the stadium.  The agents’ various photographs of the event were posted on a bulletin board at the Tampa FBI office afterwards, and everyone was asked to vote on the best.  Moe’s photograph won.  Naturally, he is quite proud of it, and it hangs in his house.  He gave me permission to use it gratis.  The image isn’t perfectly focused, and the color has faded with age.  But the graphics department at the University of Nebraska Press turned those into strengths for a dramatic, ghostly book cover using the never-before-published photograph of John Kennedy four days before the Dallas tragedy.

            After Kennedy’s assassination, FBI Director Hoover sent Moe and other Tampa agents certificates of appreciation for their work in guarding the president on November 18.  Their work was one of the few bright spots in the FBI’s presidential security efforts at the time.  Hoover secretly censured several agents for their failures in investigating Oswald before the assassination.

            Moses Aleman has so many interesting stories that I had to resist the temptation to tell more of his back story in the book.  He grew up in a bilingual household in Texas, comfortable with both English and Spanish.  After graduating from the University of Texas, Moe went into the Air Force where he was in intelligence and had occasion to work with FBI agents.  One day, he overheard two agents speak to each other in rather halting Spanish.  They were surprised when he joined in with far more fluency than they had learned at language school in Monterey, California.  The agents said that the FBI needed Spanish-speaking agents because of the Kennedy administration’s interest in Cuba and urged Moe to join when he got out of the Air Force.  Moe likes to tell of taking the FBI’s language test.  He was given two newspaper articles, one in English and one in Spanish, and told he had an hour to translate each article into the other language without use of a dictionary.  “I was completely fluent in both languages,” he says, adding that he finished the test in five minutes.