Larry Hancock

John, it really is a waste of energy to continue to discuss any level of detail until you read the source material I referenced - and for that matter its now been years since I was dealing with it myself (my own studies were mainly between 2000 and 2006 when I was doing the work on SWHT; the 2010 edition had only a few updates pertaining to him). I've done three historical studies/books since working with the Nagell material. I would be silly for me to try to be more specific without going though it all again myself. However, as I recall Nagell told Dick that he did undertake some translation activity with visiting Japanese, simply as a favor to some of the local office folks. Beyond that, what got him involved with the FPCC and exile matters is another story and you will need to explore that yourself. As far as Mexico City, his contact there was with a CIA officer whom he had known in Japan. So, generally speaking, no he had no special knowledge other than language skills as a known quantity, unconnected to the Agency but personally known to the CIA officer who was operating in a very detached role at that point in time. I wish you well if you choose to explore this but I'm not going to embarrass myself by claiming to recall details that I really don't....

The only thought I can contribute here is that Sam Cummins was getting very involved in procurement for the Agency about this time, first with weapons and ammo for PBFORTUNE and after PBSUCCESS he did some large scale sales to reequip the Guatemalan army with a new set of weapons. Don't know that any of that would make sense but along with what was going on in Albania/Greece that would be another Agency area of activity that involved weapons traffic. Also, if Olin was doing some covert sales for the US government, certainly I would expect some broad cover statements from them that would obfuscate the movement of certain ammo...but I'm guessing Gary knows all about that possibility.

Jon, as it shouldn't until you spend a great deal of time on it....couldn't agree more. However I would point out that I don't myself feel that Nagell was officially working for either the Agency in any formal or paid role as an agent or source. However, I do believe that he was in contact with CIA officers and very possibly KGB officers as well, in line with his own interests and available to them on a totally unofficial basis for peripheral activities of their own interests...very likely unknown inside the official reporting hierarchies. I know you are skeptical of this but with our current knowledge of CIA "soft files", with proven field officer involvement in unsanctioned operational activities and with statements from officers themselves - all recounted in Shadow Warfare and elsewhere - I personally feel the operational side of the CIA Plans Directorate functioned with a lot more discretion for its officers and with a lot less formal reporting than the intelligence collections and analysis groups. It's also quite possible that Nagell "name dropped" and exaggerated his role....however, that does not preclude his possible contacts or observations in Japan nor his proven activities in and around the Fair Play for Cuba Committee both in the US and Mexico City....how much of that was at his own initiative and how much might have been "encouraged" will likely remain a mystery somewhat on the line of Oswald himself. The crux of the matter though is whether he was traveling in the same Cuban exile circles and fundamentally whether or not he observed Oswald in contact with suspicious exiles known to him in New Orleans. It should be noted that Nagell had no information on the Dallas attack, but rather on the contacts in NO and a potential September plot in the DC area - something corroborated by Oswald's own SWP and CPUSa correspondence about a move there which could not have been independently known to Nagell. In any event, I expect your studies of the material I suggest will prove interesting even if they do not lead to a solid conclusion, for me Nagell is valuable only in regard to the fact that his remarks about Oswald and the exiles in New Orleans are corroborated by other sources and serve to show one step in the events prior to Dallas...in which Oswald was very visible to a variety of Cuban exiles who were in turn themselves in contact with CIA filed officers out of JMWAVE in Miami.

One of the keys to evaluating Kurtz would be to verify that he has indeed turned over his interview tapes and other related documents to his Sensitivities archives as he said he would. Those primary materials are critical to evaluating his more explosive claims.....we checked with the archivist some time ago and he was unaware of any donations or plans to donate by professor Kurtz. Its probably time for someone to make a new check on whether or not the materials showed up or to contact Kurtz and ask when/where he will make them available.

I would recommend anyone seriously interested in this read the initial CIA IG report, the one which was so critical that Bissell was allowed to write a rebuttal. It contains a number of extremely interesting points about the extent to which both the President and JCS were briefed (only orally) and is probably the most objective assessment of the CIA's internal failures with the project: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000129914.pdf

The materials taken into custody are verified in police and court records, as to the identification of the CIA personnel, the Agency was questioned on the point and actually acknowledged the individuals and employment in a memorandum ...as I recall, to the HSCA. These were not covert nor covered CIA personnel, they were office type people...I don't recall if their positions were specified. As to the citations and sources on all these things, you will find them in the books and documents....I would not pretend to recall individual citations, that's why I write books and publish research including document collections....certainly I don't trust my own memory on specifics. I should note that obviously Dick did the primary work on Nagell including contacts with his lawyers, the court archives, and even the police and jailers involved as well as former service persons, Nagell's family and friends. I've shared a few documents and records I located and obtained via FOIA but the vast bulk of the research has been his and at best I've contributed a minor amount...but that includes the possible identification of Nagell's CIA contact in Mexico City....who had also been stationed in Tokyo when both Nagell and Oswald were in Japan.

Jon, to help I will give you some excerpts from the study which you would find on the Keys to the Conspiracy CD (I don't go into nearly the same detail in SWHT). Nagell was give a combat field promotion in Korea, to Lt. As of 1955 when he was given a Top Secret clearance he was a Captain. He was discharged from active duty with Army CIC following an airplane crash which damaged the side of his head and the Army medical appraisal of him at that time was that "this officer shows no evidence of psychosis or disabling neurosis. He is immature...he is a management problem...but he does not require further neuro psychiatric hospitalization". (situational note - this was at a time when Nagell had been having problems following is marriage to a Japanese national, problems with his assignment and with his fellow officers). A great many of his personal problems related to his wife, her nationality and later to custody over their children. In contrast, one of his former sgt's in Korea described Nagell as a maverick simply because he always wanted to do things by the book and was totally intolerant of bending the rules....which was his complaint about certain CIC activities in Japan. In Nagell's poessession, when taken into custody at the bank, was a Fair Play for Cuba newsletter, a Minolta camera and developing kit, a jacket from a Mexico City clothing store with 2 Mexican tourist cards hidden in the lining....one card had the name Joseph Kramer, the other Aleksei Hidel. He had two notebooks, one of which was later returned and one which was not. The one which was returned contained the unlisted number for the Cuban embassy in Mexico City with Sylvia Duran's name (same as in Oswald's notebook), a note from an FBI agent concerning names and meetings at unspecified locations, with dates. It also contained the names - which were later verified - of six CIA personnel, some on the West Coast and one or more in DC. Nagell's recorded statements to officials (with affidavits) on the assassination include the following...that Lee Oswald had been recruited into a conspiracy against the President and some sort of incident that was to occur in the DC area in September 1962. That Oswald's contacts were anti-Castro Cubans representing themselves as Castro agents. That the conspiracy itself was of domestic inspiration and origin and that that he had provided this information to the FBI following his arrest. Hopefully that will get you started and I think that in SWHT you will find details which are verifiable, on the CD you will find a much more situational analysis of Nagell's evolving legal problems and remarks as well as related documents and of course in Dicks's book a much more personal view of the man himself.

Jon, at the risk of being rude, you simply need to do a more significant amount of homework to judge Nagell. You said you were going to read Russell's books on him, hopefully The Man Who Knew Too Much and the newer version. Have you read my Someone Would Have Talked which discusses Nagell in some detail? Have you gone through the CD I recommended? Were the documents you refer to in my posting on my own web site....that's the only place I've posted any. The bottom like is that if all you have read about him is online or at McAdams site which does offer a very negative view of him online then you simply don't have the full picture. Indeed your summation of the Nagell story in your last sentence is very far from the much more complex story that I touch in in my book and Dick goes into in extreme detail. Certainly Nagell was not employed by the CIA in any formal sense sense, nor did he state that he had been. He did describe being in contact with CIA personnel, providing information and performing tasks for individuals who he knew to have been CIA but also individuals who he felt might have been misrepresenting themselves to him. Given that I don't try to change anyone's opinion and that I've often said forums are very insufficient places to explore any of these subjects effectively without a lot of background, I'll leave it at that. If you do decide to explore the source material I cited and remain totally skeptical that's fine too....Nagell himself admitted to not at all having a full picture of what was going on around him at all times and he certainly did have some psychological issues...he never denied that either. In any event, I'll not pester you on the subject, it took several years and huge amount of study for me to even develop an opinion on him.

Tommy, in a literal sense Hawkins might be said to be speaking correctly. Based on his conversations with Bissell, JFK did limit the overall air commitment and never restored it as Bissell promised Easterline and Hawkins. I don't know where the 1,000 in the foothills comes from, if anything that was from the earlier Trinidad site much close to the mountains. And it is possible that with unlimited air support and no Cuban aircraft attacking during the landing, the Brigade might have - just might have - had at least some success. Lynch gives a detailed view of how that could have happened, it would have required total air superiority over the island and a series of ongoing Brigade B-26 strikes staged and supplied from the landing field at adjacent to the beach. There was no way such an air offensive could have operated on an ongoing basis out of Nicaragua. But of course Kennedy had never approved unlimited air support before or during the landing.....and with the machine gun equipped Cuban jet trainers more B-26's in the air might just have meant more Brigade B-26's lost over the Beach head. The only other option would have been full scale tactical Navy air cover which had never been in the plan. Its hard to know what was inside Hawkins head during the interview with Evans or for that matter what sticks in the mind of a 96 year old....I know I sometimes make mistakes off the top of my head these days and I'm still shy of 70. It may also be that Evans was just inserting Hawkins into the standard "JFK was responsible" storyline that appeared in so many articles on the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, I saw that in lots of articles, especially out of Florida and Miami papers.

Well there is little doubt that Easterline and Hawkins came to that conclusion, the strange thing is that he fooled them for the better part of two decades and until they were shown actual documents a good deal of what had come down around them was totally beyond them. The sad part of it was that they had taken him at his word and they and other operational folks sincerely felt Kennedy was to blame; people like Lynch felt even more strongly, considering JFK a traitor. And Bissell apparently encouraged dumping all the blame on JFK; either because he was in denial or because he was protecting the assassination plot, or Alan Dulles, whatever. But if Bissell was a weasel, Alan Dulles's behavior was equally objectionable......do we really believe that he left the country during the operation and did not even use the available communications in Puerto Rico to monitor progress, that he had no operational contact with Bissell over some three days, that he totally removed himself from acting as an intermediary with JFK. If true and if he had been in the military he should have been court marshaled for dereliction of duty, convicted and served prison time.

David, it appears Jon has made up his mind based on what he has already read - before going to the source material....I'm sorry to hear that. Jon, I think you have made some great points about the role of "intelligence", intelligence officer's jobs and how they formally handle them. Honestly I have to say that in regard to CIA operations (not intelligence and analysis), I don't think matters were nearly as structured nor do I think covert officers always operated in as "controlled" a fashion as you describe for military intelligence - or for that matter the CIA's own intelligence staff. But its taken me years and a lot of study to reach that conclusion.

And I would point out that the point about a last ditch effort to kill Castro was indeed true, it is speculation that relying on it was Bissell's primary motive. What we know at this point in time is what Greg states in his material is corrected and documented - and it removes the blame that the exiles and media still wrongly point at JFK. Whether Bissell was gambling on a successful Castro assassination, whether he was inept or whether their was some more covert plan between Dulles and Bissell in regard to JFK is certainly a mystery to me and I don't know how it would ever be resolved.

Well the good news is that we know a great deal more about what was going on with Angleton, Phillips, Fitzgerald and virtually everything pertaining to Mexico City than I did when making those posts way back in 2004, much of it due to actual documents and most recently due to Bill Simpich's research. What has not changed is my agreement with the suspicion that Oswald was not simply being either stubborn or naive in regard to breaking contact with the Cuban exiles and that Nagell himself had little idea of everything that was going on with and around Oswald. And as long as I'm commenting on this I should point out that Nagell independently commented on Oswald's recruitment by those false agents for something in the DC area in September. If was years later that Oswald's correspondence with SWP and CPUSA confirmed his intended move back to the East Coast in that time frame...a move that never happened because the plan apparently aborted....likely due to concerns over Nagell appearing on the scene in New Orleans.

David, I don't have that edition handy, I do recall Nagell stating that he knew of Oswald and that he "monitored" his contacts in Japan, trying to find out what Oswald was really up to. I thought it was Nagell himself who talked about his own contact with the Soviets and Eroshkin. What Nagell might or might not have been doing with Eroshkin clearly would fall outside any normal CIC activity as far as I can see....but my memory is not at all good enough to discuss this without diving back into Russell's writing. ...it would also be very important to separate any thesis he came up with from specifically what Nagell told him about the subject. I'll have to leave this to someone with the time to dig back into the details... Larry

Jon, Nagell was a CIC officer in the Army, that is not simply a possibility but a matter of record, disclosed extensively in his released filed. And actually Nagell talked very sparingly about his assignments and what he did say was after he had been badly handled by the American justice system...that's a story unto itself. Its impossible to understand his comments other than against a chronology of his entire story, which is why I said it was situational. To expand on that point, I don't recall him providing Dick any information at all in the areas you noted - and he never positioned Oswald as an agent of any sort, simply an individual he monitored in Japan - primarily due to Oswald's appearance and interest in the Soviet embassy there. Actually what I intended to say was that Nagell had contact with CIA officers after his discharge, in no sense would he have been classified in an official agent relationship. One thing that I do note is that your view of intelligence is a very structured one and I can understand that. However, we have learned through documented examples as well as statements from former CIA officers that vest pocket and off the books operations were often run by certain field personnel with little documentation and outside the normal reporting scheme. Soft files and other techniques were used to ensure that certain activities were specifically not reported to headquarters or in official files, a type of operational deniablity in and of itself. Indeed officers are on record as saying that they were ordered to obfuscate or literally lie in their official reports as a means of both deniablity and security; verbal directions in meetings were sometimes in direct contrast to what was being noted in written headquarters communication. I tried to capture a sense of that in my book Shadow Warfare, the best that I can offer you is that in certain instances real world CIA practices were very different not only from military intelligence practice but I suspect very different from their own official practices....and we have documented evidence of case after case in which real world practices were in contrast to CIA office security practices and indeed flew in the face of Office of Security recommendations and warnings.

Jon, I would suggest to you that Nagell and his contacts with intelligence agencies are a very complex subject. Once you get past Dick's book (and he covers Nagell in both his original and with more detailed document info in his newer book on the assassination) I suggest you obtain my CD "Keys to the Conspiracy" from Lancer. It has a host of actual Nagell documents plus an analysis of his behavior and revelations at various points, which is very situational. Certainly Nagell was an Army CIC officer, there is no doubt of that. He was also in contact with CIA officers on the west coast following his discharge, that is verifiable and there is a fairly circumstantial case to be made that he was used in a "non-standard" off the books role by one CIA officer who was assigned to both Japan and later to Mexico City, and ultimately to the JMWAVE project and finally AMWORLD. Bottom line, without a huge amount of study its virtually impossible to thoroughly assess Nagell or his story, regardless of what you might find online about him.

Well said Robert, Mark and Chris! Now it seems to be getting somewhere I can follow. Certainly its long been discussed that there were effectively two rounds of shooting, with some shots heard and some not by different witnesses. That also sits well with remarks about a "flurry" of shots and the thought of "lengthening" the shooting event fits well with the sort of subtle manipulation that could be done to make it appear that the shooting could be done by a single gunman. A very interesting discussion.

It is most definitely a fake and a rather good one at that - at least in the perspective of being in the right number sequence. Yet no document with that number actually exists nor does it come from the National Archives as claimed. This is a good example of how nothing ever goes away on the internet and the amount of bad stuff that floats around forever. Some very competent researchers were excited about this at first (and I was as well) because it seemed to be legitimate in terms of the numbers series, but after spending time and money to go to NARA it turns out to be bogus and contains some internal errors as well. Its either an actual piece of misinformation, intended to divert or discredit researchers or a nasty practical joke....there have been a few this good but not many fortunately.

Malcolm, as I understand it the experimental shop was a security area and did work on some military or government products,not sure exactly what. Reportedly Oswald was first assigned there and placed under heavy surveillance to see if he did give any indication of acting as a spy......once they were comfortable that he was not trying to actively collect any information, engage in any sort of drops or otherwise justify attention they moved him out into the commercial plant area. As I recall that comes from Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tail and Mailer's review of the KGB documents on Oswald including their surveillance and monitoring of Oswals inside the USSR.

David, I'm aware of those things...and I have John's book too.. but like the details of the shooting, trajectories, etc. I leave that to others to dig into. For my interests its very clear that multiple intelligence agencies were very well aware of Oswald, obtained information from him directly, through observation and cut outs and that he was very well known to certain sections of the CIA and FBI prior to the assassination. The CIA document Simpich obtained recently which remarks about Oswald "maturing" simply reinforces the fact that he was a known quantity. That's really enough for me because it establishes the context by which he might be used in the Dallas assassination plot. .....I'll leave the rest for others to puzzle out if at all possible, at my age I have to husband what energies remain... Larry

Robert, it would only be appropriate for him to buried there. He was a highly decorated Korean war veteran, combat decorations for that matter and he obtained a disability pension related to the military air crash which occurred back in the US. Absolutely no reason for him not to be buried at Arlington.

To add a little more speculation, it seems very likely that Oswald may have been a low level source for the ONI in Japan, in regard to Communist planted bar girls working the military scene. However one highly credible sign of intelligence interest in Oswald - at least to me - comes in reports that were investigated by HSCA pertaining to a CIA contact report dated 1962, the report related to information on the Minsk radio plant and was routed to the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA's Soviet Branch of the Directorate of Intelligence. The report very likely was based in a debrief of Oswald upon his return to the US which had long been rumored but denied later by the CIA -- or from information in Oswald's "manuscript". The report was also investigated by CBS news and a related CIA document provides pretty clear confirmation that the story was not only real but successfully obfuscated by the CIA during the investigations. If you have SWHT 2010 you will find details on page 84/85. For what its worth, if Oswald had gone into or appeared to get in touch with the Soviet embassy in Tokyo, as Nagell described, it would likely also have come to the attention of the CIA's Soviet Branch, it probably goes without saying that the Soviet Branch not only collected information but conducted operations to obtain intelligence....

For a timeline reference, in 1963 Fitzgerald had just been appointed to head SAS, the Cuban operations group, and he recruited Phillips to serve underneath him. Fitzgerald appears to have been the driving force pushing the Cubela option - while constantly being advised that Cubela was likely a double agent or at minimum under tight surveillance by Castro. In 1966 Fitzgerald became Deputy Director for Plans for the CIA. It was several years later that Phillips moved into that slot, after serving in a number of positions across Latin America and having been appointed as head of Cuban Operations in 1968.

It's my recollection - but it may be wrong - that Marina did get some returns released but she was pretty badly turned off by the research community, only shows a couple of folks and nothing has been heard since then.. For those interested, the people she was talking to at the time were Ray and Mary La Fontaine and they briefly mention it in their book. I've been advised, and now recall, that Marina also shared it with Mary Ferrell and she may have written about it in one of Penn Jones last newsletters; those who have them might take a look, I don't have copies myself. The bottom line was that there was nothing notable in the reports - as one would actually expect from any perspective.

During 1963, Phillips reported to the Chief of Station in Mexico City, where he had been assigned for some time and that fall was assigned to begin working for Des Fitzgerald, the head of the new SAS Cuban operations group. Phillips himself said that he also consulted with and served as an advisory on propaganda and psychological operations, and certainly would have at a lateral relationship to JMWAVE and one that would have gotten more direct in his new management position in SAS....one reason why his trip back to DC including a visit down to JMWAVE as well.