Larry Hancock
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Posts posted by Larry Hancock
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I've certainly heard enough to know that there were issues around Mary - and that she was accused of building files on researchers. I also know she would "assign" projects, one I recall was getting a couple of folks to go to Mexico City to research the address on the "Hunt letter". I came in relatively late, I do know a few of my subjects that she was very interested in and wanted to discuss but I never got anything more than encouragement. I also recall Harrison Livingston's book which cast her and several of the Dallas researchers in a negative light and really came down hard on Mary for keeping track of researchers. Given my history with both Harry and Mary I'm pretty comfortable with giving that round to Mary...grin.
Anyway, I suppose anyone who has been into this as deeply and as long as Mary was is bound to pick up a good deal of baggage and for that matter make some mistakes, I know I have. I'll confine myself to commenting on the MFF which I did see jell early on as Ollie Curme was actually acquiring the material from Mary. I've worked with Rex since then (and longer, back to when HTML and pdfs were both new and exciting) so I do have a pretty good picture of that part of the story....and I was the one who first linked Ben and Rex up on what ultimately was the hard copy transfer of materials to Baylor. All part of my document geekishness I suppose..
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Dawn that's not the title of this thread so I commented on the Foundation.....as to the latter, all I can say is that from my relatively limited personal experience I saw Mary question and challenge everyone including people like Hemming and others and clinically cut many of them to shreds if she found them to be unreliable, one of the sharpest individuals I've seen, with ice cold critical faculties. If she had an agenda or let her politics drive her I didn't see it - unlike may in the "conspiracy community" I saw no evidence of her pre-judging or letting emotions rule....her negative assessment of Judyth was one of the later examples of that. I think our quest would be a lot better off if we had more researchers as analytical as Mary was...but then that's just my style.
Which is of course not to say there might be a lot I don't know, I can only comment on what I saw which was only a short span of her total involvement. I was introduced to daughter, never new her son.
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Perhaps every single incident is a false flag intervention - then again if the hidden government is so all powerful, and since only people like Jim can reveal it all - why do they feel compelled to keep doing such things? Or do they have to spin a few authors and internet gurus out to reveal it to everyone just to show how powerful and obsessive they are....certainly something to ponder.
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Well I know that lots of folks love as many conspiracies as possible but since I'm directly associated with Rex Bradford and the MFF I would answer that you can trust it - based on my personal experience. Rex has done an immense job of putting Mary's documents on line and the bulk of her physical and non-documented materials have been transferred to Baylor University and its archives for physical access. Rex has increasingly worked with the ARRC to put additional material online beyond Mary's documents and on line access to a range of material none of us dreamed of back over a decade ago. For those who want to go back to where it was when I started, with individual requests to NARA and waits of months and years plus hundreds of dollars in duplicate page copy expenses - have at it. For those with doubts, have you ever thought of actually communicating directly with Rex and asking questions? The one problem that we have is that there are now generations of unredactions in documents so I know from personal experience that you can find more extant versions of individual documents than were available to Mary. In fact Stu Wexler and I have found that if you request the same document three or four times you may get increasingly more content....not sure how that works but we have certainly seen it. Heck, maybe that's a conspiracy too....perhaps its all part of a grand plot to discredit Judyth.....that must be it....
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For reference, Lansdale's specific military service and assignments can be found on his Wiki ....link listed below. As with all Wiki info, one has to be cautious and I personally have serious doubts about the Gold Warrior thing - but I know others love it so that's fine. I think the link is important for understanding the actual evolution of his career and helps raise attention to the military support missions which are far more important than a lot of folks appreciate. Much of what is assumed to be CIA activity actually happens under those missions, although they do make great CIA personnel covers - even better than AID - and at any point in time it might be difficult to tell the difference. My guess is that if there is a military mission in country and no CIA station, then the CIA folks use mission cover, if there is a CIA station and officially a Chief of station then there are probably the normal turf battles at times.
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Once again I refer everyone to Prouty's own extensive and voluntary interview with the ARRB - which included a detailed discussion of what he did or did not know about presidential security practices and all
his remarks about Dallas. You ought to be able to find it online but if not its on the CD Keys to the Conspiracy from JFK Lancer, including all the related ARRB memos in regard to their
dialogs about Prouty and his remarks.
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Hi David, I'm going to respond even though you asked Karl - and by the way, I enjoyed your post on impersonations. To my view I don't find JFK's outreach inconsistent at all. In 1963 JFK was pursuing a broad
variety of actions which were both high risk and sometimes seemingly at odds....conflicting tracks as it were. In Vietnam he was searching for a way to get American ground forces out of the nation and forcing some
sort of political solution - while at the same time seriously accelerating covert military operations against the North. He was pursuing neutrality in Laos, while at the same time beginning to send field artillery to the Hmong.
In Cuba he was probing a back-channel negotiation to move Castro away from the Soviets - while still allowing some level of covert operations to continue, and also allowing military contingency planning and exercises...but clamping down on exile military activity.
As far as the Soviets were concerned, his peace speech was clearly an outreach and I find that totally consistent with a desire for bringing them into a joint moon mission - he was devoted to reducing the risk of
nuclear conflict and to building some sort of buffers against spasm type nuclear exchanges. You can find that in the changes to the SIOP he was demanding.
The net to me is that there is simply no need to insert "alien presence" into JFK's motives and activities.... Larry
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Thanks David, I guess about all I can do is give some comment on the following:
"If there is no Harvey/FBI connection there is no need to cover for the CIA (but then again Larry, how much did the FBI expose ANY CIA activities to the CIA's detriment in this case?) unless we are talking much bigger issues and agreements... Can we agree that the FBI/CIA were not making the important decisions but simply carrying them out?... if we agree that orders came from higher up, Hoover would simply have to go along to keep his job, power and influence - at least what they would let him keep. The FBI was focused on removing any historical conflicts..."
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Actually the FBI effectively closed down several conspiracy leads that the CIA, or at least certain CIA stations and officers were reporting. The most prominent being the Gilberto Alverado story out of Mexico City; the FBI essentially deconstructed that whole thing - in a manner which should have been pretty embarrassing for the officers involved given that it was so inherently weak and internally inconsistent to begin with....actually that was just good investigative work although you could say it falls under the general category of a high level directive to shut down any lead not pointing specifically to Oswald as the long shooter.
On another point, SOP for the Bureau is and remains that of an investigative arm for the prosecution, true this was pretty unique since in a way they were simply preparing a report but that is consistent. The Bureau only does deep research when they are trying to solve a crime; when they have a suspect in hand, and crime scene evidence in hand, they focus entirely on building a case. After the first 24 or 48 hours it does not surprise me at all if they didn't do any deep background work on Oswald and I honestly don't see why they would concern themselves with his personal history beyond the report they were preparing....and that would focus on recent history, not his youth.
Also, if Oswald was part of some extremely sophisticated double identity thing, I would expect the CIA to have managed and sanitized the records long before. They are very good at that sort of thing. Leaving loose ends all over the place would speak to extremely bad tradecraft in one of the areas they do some of their best work, especially if the dual identity thing were part of some high value operation. Its hard for me to see going to all the trouble to create dual identifies without having some mission or use in mind.
So, even though I strongly believe that ordered to suppress a broad conspiracy investigation, as well as evidence of conspiracy, were coming from the top, with Oswald dead on Sunday, I actually don't know why anybody would spend any further time mucking about with his history, including forging pieces of it. If anybody would go back to clean up the conflicts, it would be the CIA not the Bureau - why would anybody even indicated to them there were conflicts at all. That would just get Hoover collecting dirt for later use. Clearly he came to feel that the CIA had withheld or even fed false information to the Bureau in regard to Oswald in Mexico, but that's a separate story and simply confirmed his general attitude about not trusting them.
So, I guess I can see the FBI rushing around madly the first day or so collecting any and everything they could about Oswald - primarily to expose him as perhaps a deep Soviet agent, a Castro agent etc. But by the end of the weekend I think there marching orders were clear and that was to write a report....
All of which leads me back to what I was thinking about in the first place, and that is whether or not John has developed a scenario/time line for when and who actually altered documents or prepared new ones to cover up the dual identity project - which I assume he thinks would have been CIA originated, but I might not even be right about that, just don't recall and I've loaned out his book to someone else.
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Thanks Kathy, I doubt that would end up going much further, good to know the source though. Perhaps David will come in with something more definitive linking a CIA project to FBI destruction or fabrication of Oswald history documents. All I can see is that up to the time of the assassination, the Bureau was very much interested in his background and trying to get a handle on it, especially the New Orleans office. I think its fair to say the the two agencies kept as much information from each other as they shared, so if they suddenly began working in tandem on suppressing Oswald's try background the day after the assassination, that would be really interesting.
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Steven, that incident, if true, has nothing to do with the CIA, Bureau counter intelligence is a totally different matter and of course speculation is just that. Hosty himself received no such broad orders from his supervisor, according to his own statements and his own book - what he was ordered to do was destroy evidence of certain FBI contact with Oswald and that would be a different matter entirely, having to do with the FBI and certainly not the CIA. It would have nothing to do with a Bureau level effort to destroy Oswald's life records to cover up a secret CIA project. Still if you could name the FBI CI guy who John references and give a source for that exchange with Hosty it would be interesting and we know enough about the FBI figures involved that it might be a lead.
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Actually I was looking for something a little deeper than that Steven, and specifically something from John's work - possibly with a bit of detail.
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David, your mention of the FBI and records falsification brought something to mind....I have read Armstrong's book, at the moment it is on loan and I surely can't pretend to remember the bulk of its detail. But your remark made me wonder about the following - does John address the issues below:
Assuming that there was an intensely secret and covert dual identity project launched by the CIA it would surely be extremely compartmentalized even within the Agency. And I have no doubt any such secret would be even more closely kept after the assassination. We know that on even comparatively minor things such as a relationship with Kostikov, CIA officers lied internally, refusing to acknowledge it - when caught on it later they claimed legal authority given Agency secrecy rules, even to an internal investigation, and that was accepted. Also, we know that generally the CIA was less than likely to share important intel with the FBI, as Hoover well knew. So the question is, why would the FBI care about falsifying records relating to two Oswald's, why, how and when would they even know there were two Oswalds and if they were informed about that following the assassination, are there any indications that they were actually directed to cover up a top secret CIA activity? Hoover had been perfectly ready to bust CIA chops on things like the Roselli/Castro plot, even alerting RFK to it - so did Armstrong find any indication of how the FBI was brought in to cover for the CIA following the assassination?
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Robert, I trace his career in Shadow Warfare - no separate timeline though, just his activities and assignments over a period of years as I cover various activities. I imagine there is a Wiki on him with some sort of timeline?
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You almost have to have some sympathy for Howard; that was only one of a number of things that went wrong during his relatively brief Mexico City assignment. In Miami there is the motel incident, the safe house lock down of the exile leadership and when Artime got into the AMWROLD project Hunt tried to insert himself and Hecksher was less than gentle in telling him to stay away from his project and Artime, then you have Watergate.....I'd think authoring action novels was probably a welcome change of pace. Apparently the royalty stream on that didn't hold up too well though.
I could well believe he didn't totally write the Dulles book himself, not sure he would be the right choice for non-fiction; he probably took over some edit and review chores for Dulles on the project as well as being the project liason. I would certainly like to know what else Barnes might have had him doing during 1963 though, what it is has never been clear to me.
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At the risk of taking this thread back to its title, I have to admit that I initially found the Yates story pretty convincing but now find that Greg has introduced sufficient collateral and especially timelining of Yates remarks and actions to make me reconsider based on his apparent mental problems. However, Greg, help me a bit.......you think Yates picked up Craford, if so where (I seem to remember there was an issue of where Yates was even supposed to be doing service calls that morning) and if so what did Craford say to make him memorable enough to recount the passenger to a co-worker. If it was just about Ruby's club why did Yates mention that initially...if it was about a wrapped parcel why did he not say that - and I guess beyond that, why did Craford say anything at all other than talk about the weather. Do you think Yates filled in all the details later after concluding it was Oswald, after seeing his picture on TV? Something caused him to mention it and for his coworker to support him afterwards....what was that? Sometimes I get lost in these extended threads...
-- thanks, Larry
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David, both our moon project and the Soviets are extremely well documented now - details on the Soviet moon program were available as early as 1981 in a book titled Red Star in Orbit and later books contain details from Soviet designers and even photos of the Soviet moon lander. That info became widely available when we started working on joint activities at the end of what now appears to have been the first Cold War...sigh. A moon landing was quite feasable for the Soviets until they had major problems with their own Saturn class booster including an explosion which killed several key design personnel. Until that point it was a race, after that the Soviets tried a couple of propaganda gambits including a sample return but that was small stuff compared to a landing and they turned to a focus on their large space stations. If you want sources I can give you more..
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Actually Judyth does not quite rule the world - yet at least. I will add the 2015 JFK Lancer conference with information at the link below:
http://jfklancer.com/Dallas2015/welcome.html
As usual we are cautious about the speakers listed until we have final confirmation, which invitees such as John Newman and Jeff Morley are unable to give until the
end of the summer. Russ Baker did recently commit and others including Bill Simpich, David Talbot, Pat Speer and Alan Dale were already listed. Gary Murr is probable as well,
although we may have to send in a special operations team to get him across the border from Canada.
-- Larry
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Glenn, I think Bartholomew actually did that and put out a booklet on the whole subject ....something much larger than a paper. It was spiral bound and it contained a study of the names and connections. I wish I could help with some details but that's what I recall. Don't know if I have it buried in my garage storage but I did have it at one time.
OK, so a quick search found it listed on biblio...check this out and you may be able to locate a copy:
http://www.biblio.com/book/possible-discovery-automobile-used-jfk-conspiracy/d/489312796
Here it is on Amazon...only a couple of hundred bucks:
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Douglas, if I stated the fingerprint issue as strongly as you describe it I'm surprised. What I should have said was that there were open issues with the prints and that I myself after having thought them to be conclusive had shifted back to a neutral position on them. As a side note, I myself drafted a book length manuscript on the Johnson link build around Wallace and Cliff Carter and Estes - the early portions of parts of that research are still on the Ed forum. Due to my lack of total confidence in the prints and to Estes final versions of his own story and his final book, I basked off from that feeling it was just not solid enough to pursue in print. The suspicions I do have about Johnson are expressed in SWHT and harken back to some of that early research. I also provided material for Joan's work and directed her to Richard Bartholemew, who I had been routinely in touch with ages ago and over the years on the prints - for that matter I had been in extensive touch with Jaye Harrison during the same period. Joan presented on the subject at a Lancer conference and I was unable to catch all her presentation although the parts I heard were certainly negative about Wallace. My understanding was that the book had either been delayed or pulled because of issues with her publisher but I will query her on that and her current opinion on the prints.
As to the UFO subject, I will take a look at the links you posted in a bit. My upcoming book - Surprise Attack - has a good bit about it about immediate post war period, the military intelligence community and UFO's - which were initially taken quite seriously. What more I have to say on the overall subject may come out in print someday, if I ever finish those studies. However in the interim, yes I do think there are a number of serious diversions in play, not necessarily with ill intent although in the UFO field you find all sorts of agendas and personal games - Mirage Men and Project Beta are both books that cover that sort of thing. Obviously my opinion on what is a diversion and what is not is strictly that, an opinion. However I have to admit I am becoming a bit less bashful about sharing those.
As a postscript, I did look at the links and yes its my opinion that the discussion of alien visitors, JFK, Oswald and a UFO related motivation for the assassination is indeed a diversion. That's based in some fifty plus years of study of the UFO phenomena (which I obviously believe has some overall value if I spent and spend that much time on it) and only some twenty plus years on the Kennedy assassination. I'd call it an educated and hopefully critical opinion, but still, only an opinion.
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I too have had a long term interest in the subject, since about 1962, was an early member of APRO and NICAP - but in this instance I totally agree with Ron on MJ12 which is a horrible diversion and with Karl as well in regard to a JFK connection. There has been some solid historical work on the subject and if you want the real deal check out UFO's and Government, A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords and Robert Powell.
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With a focus on actual events related to Dallas I'd love to see you guys jointly do a dialog on a subset of David's questions:
Who visits McKeown to buy rifles?
Who visits Odio?
Who is having a scope mounted?
Who is at the Sports Dome while in Irving with his family?
Who did they take out the back of the theater?
......I would also add Who was at Red Bird air field with the young couple talking about renting an airplane?
Not saying that any of those can't be challenged or are simply mis-identification but I'd like so see your thoughts on each of them.
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I've seen Weberman post on one Facebook page I view occasionally so he' still around somewhere. Of course Hemming routinely said that he made up stories and fed them to Weberman just for entertainment and in other instances he claimed Weberman totally misunderstood him. But of course Hemming said the same thing about Joan Mellon and the "help" he gave her on the Odio incident - which of course involved Murgado and de Torres rather than Paul's suspects. As far as I can tell if Hemming ever made a slip and told somebody something that might be important he would later blow it away in some fashion.
As to Weberman, I was fascinated by his material for ages but then realized I was having a hard time figuring out where he would have gotten much of it; without being able to judge that I became more neutral. But it was all totally fascinating in the beginning. After investigating some of his material in the book on the tramps I also became a bit more disenchanted - that also fueled my issues with photos since at first his photo work seemed awesome and it had to be Sturgis in the picture. Then during my "photo period" I came across a shot of Sturgis with Pedro Diaz Lantz and his brother and darn it the brother was a total look alike for the tramp, much more than Sturgis. At that point I began to realize how easy it was to see what you wanted to see in the Plaza photos.
So....beats me, I'm sure there is important material in Weberman's work, but there is a real challenge in sourcing it....at least for me.
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Paul, I don't see what document classification has to do with Hemming's statement? As far as I know we only have Weberman's remarks about Hemming saying that - perhaps Hemming repeated it somewhere else and if anyone knows that they could help by posting it here. Beyond that there is no evidence that Hemming was in any sort of ongoing personal contact with Oswald and I cannot recall Hemming claiming that anywhere else - again, if someone has a source on that please post it. I don't know AJ myself nor anyone who is close to him so I'm not sure how to get a message to him. Perhaps someone who has searched his "nodules" might add some detail on the purported Hemming call.
Speculation is fine, but without some sort of minimal corroboration it doesn't take us very far....and you have to admit a call from Hemming to Oswald in Dallas the day before the assassination is a pretty major point.
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David, that's a well presented synopsis of Hemming's reliability. I would love to hear Weberman's details on when GPH said that and what details he provided. The
point raised above on what telephone number is a great one as well, hard to think he called the Paines that evening and Ruth would not have picked up the call. I had
never given any credit to Hemmings remark about the rifle but if its to be taken seriously the telephone call itself becomes a matter for examination.
Can we trust the Ferrell Foundation?
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted · Edited by Larry Hancock
Karl, have you discussed this with or brought it to the attention of Rex Bradford? Certainly it should be explained - is there any sign Judyth asked him for an explanation. Is it just one document - you call it "heavy tampering" so I assume its more than one and certainly more than one that would relate to Judyth. If somebody can email me particulars I will pursue it with Rex - but it would be nice to have some facts and some history for him. I certainly hope such broad accusations are being made on something more than a single assertion from JVB.....