Larry Hancock

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.

OK, I must be feeling obsessive today but lets get a bit more detailed. Sturgis was a covert source providing information to the US embassy in Havana before it got booted, later he began passing info to the CIA including an early offer to kill Castro - which they rejected. After moving to Miami he became a much more active informant, run by Barker. He got to be so widely know for doing that - as noted by Hemming - that his usefulness eroded and he was left on his own....did some interesting charity scams after that among other things. Martino was an FBI informant after the assassination, pointing suspicion at Castro. He wanted nothing to do with the CIA and even during the Bayo Pawley operation they wanted nothing to do with him and would have dumped him if Alpha 66 had not insisted on his coming along. Hemming was an actual CIA informant after he returned from Cuba - for a time he even had low level clearance - but was released over a gun incident and from then on anything he provided the CIA and FBI - which he did often just as Hall and Howard did - was strictly at his initiative. Johnny Roselli was in a totally different category - actually recruited by the CIA and known at the highest levels. He was operational but totally compartmentalized. And he was given money, lots of money, most likely for operational use including bribes but we really have no idea. Ferrie and Oswald I'll leave to others, certainly Ferrie would never have passed an office of security screen as an approved asset. What he may have done for others who did have stronger connections is another story entirely. My point is that you just can't lump all these folks together and make broad statements about them. And their relationships with intelligence agencies and each other changed dramatically over time, sometimes at a month by month level. So you also have to put in the timing element when you talk about them, their motives or their actions. I'm sorry but you really do tend to paint with a very broad brush.

Paul, you are not correctly describing John Martino. Martino was in no way a low level mercenary, he was intensely anti-Castro, publicly active in the media on that point after his release from a Cuban prison and emotionally involved with the exile cause. Key exile military activists trusted him because of his experience, his sincerity and his nerve. Given his anti-Castro and anti-Communist remarks, once his book was in print he was sponsored on speaking tours - as part of a group of much more ultra right and avowedly racist speakers. Martino took advantage of the speaking tour to promote his book - he was virtually out of money at that point - and because the believed in what he was saying. As it turned out some of the tour schedule provided a handy cover for his courier and liaison work on the conspiracy, whether he was approached before he joined the tour or whether he mentioned his travel to New Orleans and Dallas and was recruited a that time is an interesting question...

Actually the proper word to describe my NEXUS scenario would be "hypothesis", there are some elements of it that have actually led to me to look for things it would suggest - and then find them - so that moves it a bit closer to being a theory, but that's about it. One of those would simply be that Angleton and Harvey, unlike much of what had been written about the two earlier, proved to have been jointly involved in the the Castro assassination project, with Angleton actually backing up Harvey. In addition the two men continued a relationship up to Harvey's death and Anglegon's correspondence speaks to something they have in common they must keep silent. Another would be the discovery that Angleton was heavily involved in Cuban counter intelligence at the same time Morales was and that Angleton used the AMOT's as sources for an intel report on Cuba after the BOP. Up to that point the word had generally been that Angleton was interested in the Soviet Union and Israel but Cuba was never on his radar. The point though is that as a hypothesis allow others to work with it, give it further research, etc. Whether it "convinces" anyone is not all that important to me since I really don't evangelize it.....publish and move on, that's me...grin. Paul has his own hypothesis on Walker, fine by me.... As to points of agreement, possibly other than that I give no credence to Walker's involvement, mistrust Paul's key sources such as Hall and Howard, etc. and feel that at best whatever Harry heard was wishful thinking much like the stuff - Milteer was hearing. Hearing ultra right guys talk about killing JFK was as common as hearing crime figures talk about it. Its the people who weren't shooting off their mouths that were really dangerous.

The CIA has always been highly compartmentalized with the clandestine service separated from analysis and counter intelligence separated from everyone - but with strong links to CIA security. Beyond that operational units such as SAS were isolated as much as possible from actual stations such as JMWAVE or Mexico City. So yes, the CIA was very much divided among itself, and when it came to counter intelligence often lied to itself as well. For that matter senior officers were legally authorized to lie to other groups inside the Agency even during investigations as standard information security practice. All of which adds to the sort of confusion you find with multiple agendas around Oswald and in Mexico City. But to get to the point. As I describe in NEXUS, one of the routine things Angleton did was to express his worries and concerns to a very small handful of people, people like Helms, Harvey, Dulles. According to first hand reports he would sit down, ramble on about his worries and how dangerous certain things were and then just leave. Sometimes that led to actual operations, more often not. That sort of thing was SOP at his level inside the Agency and gave ultimate deniablity. All of which means Angleton could well have given Harvey key information about the Castro contacts, expressed his view that JFK was a national security risk, shaken his head numerous times and gone off to another office - and had no idea what happened beyond that. As Bill Simpich demonstrates, the mole hunt and other activities in Mexico City would quite normally develop around Oswald's visit, standard counter intelligence practices. The telephone impersonation is the point of focus for tracking fingerprints of the conspiracy, not the mole hunt. So, do I see James Angleton as a villain, yes in a great many ways. Given certain of his remarks just before his death he appears to have begun to realize just how many terrible things had resulted from his own actions. Do I see him operationally involved in the conspiracy and the attack in Dallas - no.

Larry Hancock still thinks that the scenario in NEXUS is correct, the assassination originated in Angleton's concerns, expressed to Harvey, that JFK's behavior - specifically his independent negotiations with Castro - was dangerous to the country if not actually treasonous. No doubt Helms and possibly even Dulles shared that same opinion but the more important point is that Harvey shared those concerns with individuals he had been working with in Miami who felt it was the last straw; they had already totally lost confidence in JFK. And those were people who were fully experienced and operationally competent in organization covert assassination operations. The team that ended up going operational was composed of off the JMWAVE books individuals that Morales and Robertson had been using in the Castro assassination project with which Roselli had been involved. Roselli volunteered certain of his contacts and supported the effort in a minor although important fashion. And one more time, if you think that people like Morales, Robertson or Sforza would have conducted or even supported an executive action operation using folks like Hall or Howard....and for that matter Hunt. Morales is on record as saying he did not trust Hunt to keep information to himself and nobody else should either. And Bill Simpich and I were together in a radio interview last night and are very much still in synch including affairs in Mexico City. Based on his remarks last night I'm pretty sure Bill is still in synch with Nexus as well. As to a movie about Edwain Walker, maybe, there was a movie about Marita Lorenz too....but then she was a lot more attractive and with a much more sensational story e.g. I had Castro's baby. Who knows. -- Larry

I agree with Steve, its seems to be off genre, off the wall and.... I'll just stop now...

One distinction to make: "Such a group of Americans would also include such low-level CIA assets as Johnny Roselli and John Martino, both of whom also confessed to participation in the JFK murder." Johnny Roselli would never have been considered low level by anyone, he served as a money organizer and investment strategists for a variety of major syndicates, putting money first into the film industry and then into Vegas. He was selected not by the CIA per se but by someone who was a true CIA asset - Meheu - because he knew Roselli's standing with the old Casino crowd out of Havana. In fact Roselli had been selected by none other than Havana kingpin Meyer Lansky to bring a number of the more greedy casino operators into line....after one of them stiffed a friend of Richard Nixon. However Roselli's only personal connections to the Agency were Meheu and later a CIA case officer who was succeeded by William Harvey....and most likely Morales and Roberson from an operational standpoint. John Martino was never a CIA asset at all in any form or fashion and Shackley really wanted to keep him off the Bayo mission, it was only at the insistence of the Alpha 66 exiles that he was allowed to participate. The only CIA officers we can tie him to in any shape or form are Morales and Robertson and exactly what that relationship was is unclear. What we know is that he was aware of both of them and knew both to be CIA, beyond that not much. Its also important to note that Martino was largely a lone operator running his own scams and money games, as an electronics consultant to the gambling folks he was much more independent than anyone that would have been part of an organization. Painting him as low level compared to Roselli is certainly fair. My point would be that either man would have made himself available to any plot only on a personal basis, not on the basis of being an Agency "asset".

Paul, since you refer to me by name...just a minor tweak. My position has always been that a tactical team composed primarily of Cuban exiles and associated individuals - all linked to Morales and Robertson and traveling from the Miami area - would have needed one or more contacts in Dallas to familiarize themselves with the city, with a good number of local details ranging from traffic patterns to details about local law enforcement. As a part of their preparations they might well have determined that it would be useful to have certain controllable local assets for minor tasks, say police or security officers. There are a hundred different things that a local contact might be asked to do in support of a team coming from out of town - but that team will have its own chain of command and tactical coordinator. You can use "coordinator" however you want but in my terms I refer to a "tactical coordinator" who is a member of the team and has to be, no one else would be trusted. You can bring Walker in however you wish but I have to note that my view of Ruby would have been as a local source of information, perhaps a low level facilitator for certain contacts but in no sense a "coordinator" and would have been thought of at best as hired help. What Jack might have thought he was doing is another matter entirely and most likely would have depended on information relied to him by cut outs leading back to Roselli.

Steven, honestly I have to admit that I have trouble following some of your posts because of the mixing of information - however I certainly get the drift of your scenario. Actually I followed several of those points about the TSBD well before spiders web came around, including the shipping carton issue. I found it all interesting but of course there are explanations.....large cardboard boxes consolidated small cartons of books for shipping. Especially when orders involved multiple types of textbook. There were even larger heavy wood shipping containers to take hundreds of pounds of books. One early researcher commented that it would have been easy enough to toss rifles into the end of the large wooden boxes - previously with the wooden end cap taken off - then pound the nailed cap back in and nobody would ever search for the weapon. For that matter the some of the boxes which appear in photos were large enough for a man. And as far as I know none of the wooden shipping crates were ever opened and searched.....

So if I get this you are suggesting that Meheu was heavily involved in the Dallas attack and used personnel from Hughes and Collins in it in some fashion and then did the same thing with RFK. If I got that right I follow your remarks - but I can't say I've ever seen anything to support that scenario. I also have no idea why LAPD detectives would tell anyone that sort of thing unless they were playing games with them. Certainly nothing I've seen in hundreds of LAPD RFK files suggests that was a line of investigation they pursued. I do recall some misc remarks from individuals somehow relating Hughes to the JFK assassination but then again you can find gossip associating virtually anyone if you look around a bit...I think that went as far back as an article in the Third Decade journal....way to far for me to remember any details these days.

Steve, I'm at a loss to understand the relevance....my remark was very specifically in regard to a scenario being discussed in that specific thread...having to do with what sort of unwitting support might be obtained for tactical operations in Dallas, most likely via Jack Ruby. You have lost me in moving it into the RFK case thread. Of course what I have to say about LAPD detectives is pretty unflattering and is in my essays on the RFK assassination on the MFF site. As a general remark, I do think some people might have been manipulated in that case but that's another story entirely.

I'm afraid I don't follow at all....I don't know when I have presumed anything in particular about Dallas private detectives? Larry

Thanks for posting that Tommy, yes I am aware of it and Carle's position. That seems to be a rather common position for retired CIA officers, although at least David Phillip's himself did say something quite different shortly before his death. Its interesting that Carle did not reference the final remarks of his old friend, but then he may not be aware of them. Actually Carle's book is quite good, I recommend it and reference certain of his post 9/11 experiences in Shadow Warfare. I certainly would not say the same for Littell's book.

Paul, it was well publicized earlier and I've posted and blogged on it before....thought most who had been following this would recall it. The former officers name is Glen Carle and his book is "The Interrogator" or something close to that. You can find it on Amazon. Early on in remarks about the book he mentioned knowing Phillips - who had helped recruit him - had used the name Bishop. We asked him questions about that and he obviously didn't want to talk about it at that point; the initial remarks may still be on his site or may have been removed.

Paul, Veciana put his statement into a letter to Mrs. Fonzi. He has also verified that separately and it may be in a new book about him as well. For that matter, the former CIA statement who knew Phillips well and mentioned that Phillips had used the Bishop alias never backed off it either, he just stopped talking about it ....

I'm not sure why I keep doing this but... In Nexus I specifically connect Morales to Angleton in a working CI relationship dealing with Cuba and Cuban exiles. I connect Harvey, Angleton and Morales in assassination operations against Castro. I also connect Harvey and Morales and Roselli and likely Robertson in a Castro assassination team and in meetings in spring 1963 which very likely focused on JFK's new backchannel contacts with Castro - pure treason to all those in the Florida meeting. -- actually I don't do this on my own, I present work by Twyman, Morley and others but also documents. Connecting Morales to the highest operational levels in CIA Cuban ops is not a problem, he was very much aware of what was going on in the SGA. Having said that there is also a clear pattern of Morales conducting his own vest pocket operations, yes he was very much rogue as far as HQ was but only on occasion - but so were Hecksher, Sforza, Phillips and several others in that period. HQ was never in as much tactical control as they thought and for that matter given the standard practiced of deniablity really didn't want to it...which is what covered their rear when several of these same guys named above started assassinations in Chile and across Latin America later on. Now back to my buddy Bill and blackmail. He can speak for himself but my view is that the poison pill (not blackmail) activity in MC was to leave evidence that would scare off the highest levels of government from investigation of an assassination which appeared to have CIA officers involved in some fashion. Which is exactly what happened on Sunday morning Nov. 24 in a meeting at the White House. -- Larry