Larry Hancock

David, lets get a little more specific on Hunt's roles. He was a political action officer in both Guatemala and on the JMARC project. What that means is that he pressed the flesh with rebel or exile surrogates and served as a bag man for money. Beyond that he did political assessments of his contacts and wrestled with moving preferred surrogate leaders into political power positions. You would have found him working out of headquarters but in no way in a operational command post role. His trade craft was pitiful and he was written up for security violations. He also partied way too much for the security folks and was not trusted by the Ops guys - Morales noted on a memo that he would not trust him to keep any particular secret. He simply was not a paramilitary ops guy in any sense, the made contacts, he promised things to people and he passed money. He appears to have been good at that but only with his type of political surrogates, he created as many problems as he solved in that sense. If anything it seems it was his pro Agency spy stories that impressed his superiors. It would be with that background that someone would need to fit him into some role that would put him in a photograph in the Plaza.

I'm certainly not going to wade into this further, I was interested to see if something substantive had emerged since I read the book - a story about Oswald being involved in shooting at Walker certainly is nothing novel and has not been for decades. Its a wonderful diversion just now as it was in the beginning... Knowing the depth of Stephen's research on matters in New Orleans I'm content with his assessment. I do thank Paul for his response, something might have come up, always good to be current.

Thanks Paul, that was sufficient for my interest, I'll leave any further dialog to others - just wanted to see if there was anything new or if you had developed any additional confirmation, Larry

Paul, I read his book ages ago....could you give us a list of at least a few points of factual information that you found to corroborate his story? Not points of "consistency" with other information - given that his book came out decades later at a time when there was extensive detailed information on Oswald already in circulation - but independent confirmation. -- Larry

Its a bit off topic but in one of the photos of the people looking at the suspected bullet track in the grass on the far side of Elm, one of the men is pointing back at what he appears to have belt the origin of the shot was and its pretty clearly the far west side of the TSBD. At one point I talked with the son of the couple who were there and also observed - and reported - the apparent track through the grass and he was certainly adamant that they felt there was a track and a bullet or piece of one was picked up in that area.

It's pretty cyclical, Reagan's Secretary of State lobbied for the same sort of thing... We spend a lot of time on Angola and Mr. Kissenger in Shadow Warfare and noted that many of the documents pertaining to he and activities in both Africa and Latin America remained redacted and some had been released and pulled back. Looks like there might be some really interesting stuff on Mr. K.

Ernie, I was not commenting on anything in regard to Harry Dean but rather the overall concept that all previously classified documents would be mass released on a given date.

In addition to Steven's comment, the President will undoubtedly respond as the judges have consistently in Morley's efforts - if the Agency produces a list of documents they certify as being of national security concern, the President will literally accept their list - in reality he and his staff have no other option and if he released something operational or actionable by mistake it would mean political crucifixion by the other party. National Security is one issue no President can leave themselves politically exposed on....that's just the hard, cold fact. Of course why anyone would expect any known smoking gun documents to still exist seems curious to me.

I'll be presenting later this afternoon but unfortunately it has to be remote so I'll be unable to offer any first hand observations of the conference itself. From what I've seen so far, Jerry Pollcoff has done a yeoman's job at organizing a very complex event. I can feel for him, especially with Veciana session going an hour longer than scheduled.

In general terms I've always thought of at least four shots with the definition and identification varying according to the witnesses' locations. Its certainly not my specialty though and I hope that some of the folks who have really concentrated on this are willing to post their analysis and views....

Thanks for the explanation Bob, that makes your view very clear and personally I've never been hung up on any particular shooting scenario - other than knowing that both the ones offered by the FBI and WC (which themselves conflict) can certainly not be accepted on the face of things...

Robert, I think I asked this once before but in your long string of posts its easy to get lost. Before writing us all off could you just simply state the conclusion of your work and what scenario you are supporting with the pictures. Not trying to be difficult but for the simple minded such as myself, what is your point? What happened that everyone else who has researched this missed up to now?

"But surprisingly, he leaves out some of the most intriguing points about Phillips in Mexico City. Especially his work on the fraudulent tapes sent to Washington to implicate Oswald in the JFK case. For instance, Hancock does not even mention the role of Anne Goodpasture, Phillips' assistant in Mexico City. There is some extraordinary material on her in the HSCA's Lopez Report. Neither does he mention the utterly fascinating evidence that John Armstrong advances in his book Harvey and Lee. Namely that Phillips sent the dubiously transcribed Mexico City tapes of Oswald by pouch to himself at Langley under an assumed name. Why would he do such a thing? Well, maybe so that no officers but he and Goodpasture would have the tapes from their origin in Mexico City to their arrival at CIA HQ. This mini-conspiracy was blown in two ways. First, when FBI officials heard the tapes as part of their Kennedy murder investigation and concurred that they were not of Oswald. Second, when HSCA first counsel Richard Sprague showed the official transcripts of the tapes to the original Mexico City transcriber. The transcriber replied that what was on those transcripts was not what he recalled translating. It seems odd to me that these very important points would be left out of any contemporary discussion of Phillips." ....well I think it would be only appropriate to point out that I go into extensive detail on those subjects in my follow on work - NEXUS - and for that matter go a good deal further, presenting new research related to James Angleton's CI efforts in Mexico City, the mystery of the diplomatic pouch sent to DC during Oswald's visit to be claimed hands only by David Phillips. Beyond that I think I can claim to have brainstormed and helped Bill Simpich with a fair amount of material that went into his treatment of the events in Mexico City, especially the taping of the Oswald/Duran telephone impersonation. -- Larry

Paul, Dick Russell did look into it after his death and tracked down the location which contained some trunks of Nagell's stuff - supposedly he had told a family member that a particular trunk should be protected but when Dick got there that particular trunk was not present. In some of his follow on editions Dick recounted how various bits and pieces of the material Nagell reputedly had left with family and friends had all disappeared, some of it in thefts where only his stuff was taken - after very specific visits from the FBI. Given Nagell's visibility to both the FBI and CIA for so long its hard to imagine anything remaining ....he had his chance to use it when he was negotiating with the Agency for help in getting custody of his children - when he did - and separately in his argument for disability, which he won. Nagell told Russell outright that he had been forced to make compromises and having gotten fed up with trying to go through official channel - primarily Congressmen - he decided to act strictly in his own best interest and the devil take the rest.

That is an interesting letter Paul; it will be even more interesting if you find something actually dated before Nov. 22, 1963. One of the problems this sort of thing raises is that it shows Walker was willing to lie - either in 1963 or 1965 - either that or it demonstrates he was was simply unreliable. Perhaps he did indeed have good reason to lie in 1963, a whole lot of people that did know or had at least had heard of Lee Oswald prior to the assassination most definitely had sudden memory loss at that point in time. I wish they had responded and asked him to explain the discripency you point out.

To take this a bit further - and this is all reverse engineering from reading way too many documents - one of the differences between a source and an actual "asset" would be the point at which the individual in question is not just a file but in which they are considered for some sort of ongoing tasking, even in information collection. At that point they normally would get at least a superficial security check and if passing a low level of classification. You can see that in Hemming's early file. Then there would be two sorts of tasking....if its information collection they get assigned a case officer. At that point they most likely get assigned a crypt and may or may not have to take a polygraph. I've seen files on a number of media folks - as David mentioned - who got on that track, sometimes with the individual knowing what was going on and sometimes not, in several instances CIA officers appear to have worked media types just by becoming known to them and leaking information. Even some of the unknowing ones were assigned crypts. Of course this assumes the contact is going on within the system - and regular office reports are being filed. There are also plenty of cases where you get to the asset level and the person is only in a local "soft" file, not in the general CIA system. There were also lots of businessmen who were handled the same way. In some instances I've seen documents where major business people even volunteered to use their international resources to collect information and share it....certainly they would be considered assets. Where the whole thing changes is if an asset is given actual tasking - either to collect specific information or sometimes to plant information. Or if they are actually asked to go operational - as many of the Cuban exiles were. If they truly go operational it appears they were given a stipend, but were not necessarily CIA employees per se. Of course that's risky too, in one instance an exile infiltration guy bought a car and listed the CIA as his employer....the office of security was not amused. The operational types would report to a CIA office, such as JMWAVE and an operations officer such as Jenkins, Robertson, Sforza etc. They might have a case officer, not sure about that, but they would essentially be "in the system" at that point. One of the reasons the CIA was so worried about Garrison and New Orleans was that they had recruited fairly heavily there pre-BOP and there were a lot of folks from New Orleans that were "in the system"; you can look at their Garrison era memos when they keep going though the lists of names he surfaces and having to check their own files to see if somebody is in the system or not - meaning whether they would be faced to deal with legal issues of discovery. I don't want to take this too far but it is dangerous to use generic terms and paint with a broad brush when talking about these folks - if nothing else because their true status at a given point determines what is known inside the agency - to what group - and what is in the files - and what type of files - and what is known at headquarters in one department or another. And the departments were legally authorized to keep secrets from each other, even during internal investigations. Its also important to remember that all this was designed to frustrate what were arguably some of the world's best intelligence agencies....the Soviets, the British and the Israeli intel folks - we just happen to have inherited the problem of dealing with it...

You have me there David, the CIA is a federal Agency so its employees are Agency employees. Many are not of GS level that would normally lead them to be called "officers", you have clerks, analysts, and technical staff of all sorts. Same would be true of any Federal Agency including the FBI whose field staff are normally called agents. Non salaried employees are generally called assets and exist at a variety of clearance levels. Then again, non employees can be cleared to a point where they become operational and receive tasking and stipends....so that adds some confusion. I've never seen any differentiation between American citizens and non-citizens in that regard. Sturgis would definitely have been called an informant and is described in CIA documents as a "source", which is probably the most accurate. Hemming was cleared for a time at a very low informant level and lost that clearance; afterwards his reports would be considered "source" reports. I think the operational difference between a true informant and a source is that an informant can be cleared at some level and as they move up the ladder they actually receive direction and tasking as Sturgis did. As far as the reports on Hemming go...once he lost his clearance they look a lot like Howard, Hall etc....just guys who contacted the Agency and provided information. As I recall they did that for both the CIA and FBI and I think you will find both CIA and FBI source reports from Hemming. All of which adds more confusion because you have to specify what role or status everyone is at a specific time since they do change. The the term "agent", its probably misleading anyway since it sounds spyish, like secret agent and probably should be avoided. Most of the CIA guys we normally talk about were either case officers early in their career or operational officers - especially the paramilitary types in the P/P Directorate. Later some of them like Morales and Sforza moved up the management chain. People like Robertson would be called operations officers I think, Hunt was a political action officer. Accuracy is certainly a good thing, painting with a broad brush leads to misunderstandings...I'll try to be more specific in my terminology. Of course if any CIA personnel types want to chime in and give us some official personnel terminology that would be a fine thing...

Harvey's biographer did a great job of shattering the myth about the two men, retrieving extended correspondence with Harvey and with Harvey's wife after his death. A couple of letters deal with things the two men shared including one or two secrets they would have to take to their death. What was equally important to me was to find documentation that Angeleton worked on Cuban intel and CI after the BOP, getting an assignment that was reported all the way up to the NSC. In doing so he clearly made use of Morales and his AMOTS. After that, finding that Angleton had personally involved himself with Harvey on the Castro assassination project was key, Angleton not only worked with him directly trying to come up with foreign assets to do it including MI6 but later used his own third country intel assets inside Cuba to back up Harvey - all completely at h is own initiative. That all came up in doing NEXUS as did the point that in the months before his departure to Italy Harvey was one of only perhaps three folks that Angleton would routinely discuss things with....

Well let me give another it shot.....my view is that Angleton actively instigated the chain of events that resulted in the killing of JFK in Dallas. He did so in the same fashion that he did so many things, by conveying his own paranoia to senior officers such as Helms and likely a retired Dulles but most importantly to his associate, the man he had been assisting in Castro assassination activities - William Harvey. Angleton gave him a full does of the back channel Castro approach and no doubt a host of other dirt that he had on JFK, picturing him as a rogue president, conducting foreign contacts without even the State Department being involved and unwilling to accept the most basic cautions from people like Helms who continued to obstruct any and all Castro contacts. I suspect that Angleton had actually done wire taps on JFK, both with Meyer and on the calls to Castro from the apartment where they were being made. He may have even played sections which showed Castro was encouraging the contacts. Harvey was already fed up with the Kennedys and completely convinced that they were rank amateurs meddling with things that could blow up for the whole country. Angleton pushed him over the edge. Beyond that, other than in his own black bag and tap work, Angleton was not an operational guy, a covert action officer. Harvey really had not been either but had become more so with his insertion into the Staff D work and with the assassinations assignments. However he knew just the people that would take Angleton's information to heart and do something about it - Morales and company. So he gave Morales the word, no doubt they railed about JFK in their lengthy meeting that summer, along with Roselli and no doubt they pledged to do something about it. At that point it became tactical, Roselli could offer some introductions and tactical assistance and money for that matter but at that point Angleton really had little to offer and actually neither did Harvey. Do I think Angleton knew there was a conspiracy with CIA officers and exiles involved, yes I do. Was he tactically involved, most likely not. Was he headed into a period of metal problems, absolutely. In the end when he made the "who struck John statement" it was most likely correct ie. he had little idea of the actual details and didn't want one but he knew it was not Lee Oswald. -- guilty of conspiracy, sure - obstruction of justice - absolutely, murder in the second degree - the thing is he may not have known anything specific was going to happen rather than some vague remark form Harvey that it would be taken care of ....similar to Morales later remarks.... That's the way those things always worked....a few verbal conversations, head shaking, then total deniablity...

Actually yes I do Tommy, and Bill Simpich and I agree on that point. It all goes back to the voice impersonation in MC. There is a good case to be made that Oswald's visits would have served a number of agendas that Phillips had concurrently in play - ranging from an evolving anti-FPCC propaganda effort to the testing and possible recruitment of Cuban staff. What makes this very complex is that all those were in play concurrently; Phillips was driving some of them but SAS was also pulling the strings on some as well and we can't be sure which may have been compartmentalized from even Phillips. At the same time Phillips was supporting a very important exfilitration effort involving both Morales and Sforza and Castro's sister. The complexities are mind boggling...my mind at least. But to the point, the phone calls were key to establishing a much closer connection between Oswald and the Cubans than ever really existed - combined with some very accurately planed false stories they made a good case for connecting Oswald to a Cuban plot. And the phone calls were driving the station up the wall, all this involves a special package which was sent via diplomatic pouch to DC, to be hand delivered in person to only David Phillips there. This gets to be a long story which Bill tells far better than I, but the point is once everybody had time to look back at how the calls had to have been made to show up on the taping systems which they did, it becomes pretty suggestive that only someone with inside knowledge of the complex phone tap system could have known just how to get those calls on tape when they were not actually made by Duran and Oswald. And it just so happens that the wire tap monitoring guys had been visited and trained by Morales personally trained AMOTS - who were taken over by Sforza and worked as much for Morales and Sforza as they did for the Agency, sort of a private counter intel and strong arm unit. I should note that it was Sforza who was ordered to conduct an investigation of exile participation in the JFK assassination - and whose report mysteriously never made it outside Miami...it seems. For reference, a number of these guys had been in the original OP40 effort and some made it back into what became a longer term thing and led to everything from assassinations to drug running, mostly in Latin America. So...long winded answer, by Sunday morning Bill and I both think that there were already suspicions that CIA officers might have been involved - and that ultimately Phillips would have figured out just who might have known enough to plant a Castro link in MC via the telephone tap system....telephone calls which actually turned into a poison pill for the CIA, intended or not. And of course, given his other had - not sure how many that makes - Phillips was the primary user of info from the tap system on the Russian and Cuban diplomatic facilities. -- sorry, perhaps I should have just responded with "yes"....grin

To go along with that, I should point out that there was a serious rift between Morales and Phillips which occurred after Phillips early retirement. Phillips actually conducted his own personal and highly sophisticated psyop operation following the work of the Church committee and though the inquiries of the HSCA. And he started writing, lots of things, articles, op ed. Most folks don't know he published multiple books even after The Night Watch. Not to mention his floating his little draft manuscript on Oswald, the CIA and the JFK assassination....real teaser there. But along the way, a journalist showed up on David Morales doorstep, indicating he had been referred to Morales as a great source for CIA war stories. Of course Morales went ballistic, he wrote to the Agency and requested Phillips be investigated for security violations. I found copies of the documents in both men's files as I recall. It generated a fair amount of paperwork, nothing came of it in the end but Morales was really hot. Actually it looks like Phillips may have indeed sent a journalist to Morales, if so you have to wonder why.....wild speculation might suggest that eventually Phillips had figured out he had been played and had a good idea who would have known enough to do it....and was either getting a point across or just engaging in some minor revenge. -- Larry

Tommy, I definitely agree and I think the historic view of Phillips has probably been way to simplistic. I elaborate a good bit on what Philllip's role was in the fall of 63 in NEXUS and Bill Simpich and I worked that issue jointly for some time, especially based on new things we have learned about Angleton's push to establish his own CIA presence in Mexico City and along side Fitzgerald at SAS as well. Angleton didn't really trust anybody to do CI except his group and given the horrendous penetrations of the Cuban operations he was right on that point. Actually he was making a similar play against in Saigon at the same time and he was certainly dead on there - Shackley proved as inept at CI in Saigon as he had in Miami. The point of that tangent is that in 63 Phillips was working both CI and psyops - in Mexico City for his boss there, then under Fitzgerald at SAS and very likely at least aiding and abetting Angleton's CI activities. Simpich points out that Phillips and one of the MC staff both got relatively poor performance reviews for 63 and it may well be because they were suspected of having been less than totally "loyal" to the MC Station Chief. So, you have Phillips working actively to penetrate the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic staff in MC; you have him joining SAS and undertaking psyops against Cuban activities and in particular the FPCC and you have him acting as a mentor to SAS activities in Miami. Above and beyond that, we have the now well established point that as Maurice Bishop he was running his own vest pocket operations with Veciana and others - and continued to run Castro Assassination plots in Latin America for another full decade, apparently totally on his own initiative. At that point he had all the necessary authorial to do those sorts of things and I go into that in detail in Shadow Warfare. Given all that, there is plenty of reason to think that he was very much aware of Lee Oswald in the fall of 63 and indeed manipulating his visit to MC for very possibly multiple agendas. By the way, I should note that on more than one occasion Phillips was given demerits for running his own little games - I ran across a fascinating disciplinary note pertaining to one of those he played against the Soviets in MC, involving stolen radioactive materials. The man was far more creative than we will likely ever know. On the other hand, he played so many hands and so many games that at some level those who knew about some of them - like Morales - could easily have taken advantage of him.

Paul, the word would not be "innocence" and it would not be "guilt", the right word for evaluating their remarks should really be "reliability", another relevant word would be "credibility". Talking about the innocence or guilt of each in regard to involvement or even of of personal knowledge of the Dallas attack is something else entirely. Assessing such things for the individuals on your list is something I spent at least two decades on and I've published a lot of that research - totally independently of my books - in papers, presentations etc. That's the context of my assessment - which in the end is simply an educated opinion. I have mine, you have yours....I'll follow along to see if you come up with anything new but as others have observed, these dialogs don't really seem to accomplish much. If I see a factual problem I'll sign in, otherwise I'll watch for something out of those Walker papers you have remarked about so often... -- Larry

I wouldn't expect it but rather than that just being an opinion, there is a great deal to prove it - as the Church Committee and the Kerry Committee - among others - learned. One of the reasons I wrote NEXUS and then Shadow Warfare was to try and really document what Agencie's practices were, in particular NEXUS looks specifically at political assassinations to see how such things happened in and around the Agencie's operations and missions. During the very first years you actually did find such practices discussed and documented and rather amazingly, CIA internal history folks collected and recorded such documents in regard to PBFORTUNE and PB SUCCESS, but that practice stopped early on and never returned. As time passed, the practice of using "soft/destroyable" desk files rather than putting things into the official filing system became common and even later there are good examples of entire parallel sets of action between what was going on in the field and what the field was officially reporting. Circa 1963 you would never find documentation on anything about such an action on paper, the most seminal discussions of his being a national security risk would all be verbal. And from there on anyone deciding to do something about it certainly would not write anything down. And down at JMWAVE, anything done using actual Agency money or materials would easily be piggybacked on another operation. The Castro assassination op was totally black, no records, no paper trail, all down far away from JMWAVE standard practices and accounting - skimming what might be needed would be no trick. Which means that participation by CIA officers in any fashion will never be proved - the best you've got are anocdotal remarks - but when Phillips finally admitted there was a conspiarcy and intelligence officers were involved that's pretty much enough for me.... -- Larry

Paul, I'm certainly not going to spend time deconstructing your logic. My only comments will be made in regard to descriptive or factual error or when someone asks my opinion. In that regard In my opinion your list is meaningless since only two people on it were involved in the plot...Martino and Roselli...and both rather peripherally, not part of the tactical team per se. But we each get to make our own list so good luck with yours.. My one other point would be that you said you had read NEXUS and if so you know that there are virtually no know instances of an actual CIA employees ever conducting an assassination, standard practice was for that to happen only with very deniable third parties, normally not even informants and certainly not listed and security cleared assets. Such things were always done via case officer cut outs so if an attempt was investigated the case officer and the Agency could always deny that they actually told anyone to do such a thing (well sure they might have talked with them or been approached by them but they certainly never gave them orders to do such a thing)....the Lumumba attempt is the only one that was a bit different and that was so screwed up it hardly counts as SOP.