Allegations of PFC Eugene Dinkin

CIA OUT Teletype No. 85770, notifying the White House and other federal agencies on 29
Nov 1963 of Dinkin's allegation.

Private First Class Eugene Dinkin was a cryptographic code operator stationed in Metz, France. On November 4, 1963 he went AWOL from his unit, and 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. He also told reporters that "they" were plotting against President Kennedy and that "something" would happen in Dallas. After Kennedy was murdered, a friend of Dinkin's named Dennis De Witt told military authorities that Dinkin had predicted Kennedy's assassination for November 28, and later changed the date to November 22.

Dinkin was arrested on November 13 and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and latered transferred to Walter Reed, where he underwent various psychological tests before eventually being released. His allegation reached the White House on November 29, and went to the Warren Commission in April of 1964.

Retellings of the Dinkin story typically note his status as a crypto operator, and speculate that he may have learned of an assassination plot decrypting military communications, perhaps between military plotters and Marseilles assassins. But the FBI reports on Dinkin, including interviews with him conducted in April 1964, state that the allegations came about from Dinkin's study of military publications such as Stars and Stripes. Dinkin told the FBI that it was his study of "psychological sets" which revealed to him both an anti-Kennedy bias as well as a military plot in the works. How we could divine the latter, and in particular attach dates and places for the upcoming murder, is hard to imagine.

One explanation would be that Dinkin indeed learned about a plot through his crypto assignment, and that something about his confinement at Walter Reed led him to suppress this in favor of the story the FBI reported. An opposing view would of course be that he was a paranoid individual who happened to make a lucky guess.

One method of determining the truth would have been to interview his military associates to see what he told them about where his ideas came from, including those named by Dinkinin his FBI interviews: PFC Dennis De Witt, PFC Larry Pulles, Sgt. Walter Reynolds, and R. Thomas. The FBI, after taking these names, does not appear to have followed up on them. The Warren Commission took no interest in the matter, and indeed omitted any mention of Dinkin from its purportedly encyclopedic 26 volumes of evidence.