Larry Hancock

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

Paul, just a few comments below identified by ....... You're surprising me with your suggestion that General Edward Lansdale might not be a plotter in the JFK murder -- despite Colonel Fletcher Prouty's clear naming of Lansdale in his surprise assignment at the South Pole instead of protecting JFK in Dallas -- which seems very damning to me -- Prouty was so close to the action. ......I think you will get a broader view of Prouty and Lansdale's respective day jobs circa 1963 from the references I provided. Both were military officers detailed to support CIA activities at various points in their career but their experiences and roles in 1963 were really quite different. Prouty a SACSA staff position and Lansdale essentially put back there after serving as CIA Chief of Base in Vietnam, then seconded to some high level fact finding missions and ultimately given a presidential appointment to Mongoose by JFK, then referred by JFK to a very high position in Vietnam - either CIA or State Department - and rejected and opposed by everyone else and essentially dumped back into SACSA while they orchestrated his early retirement. You can rise quickly if the president is in your corner but it doesn't make everybody else happy with you, jealousy is a constant. ......as to Prouty's assignment to protect the president, well I suggest you read his voluntary interview with the ARRB and make your own assessment. Yet, I'll keep an open mind. Fletcher Prouty is a key source for me -- as he was a key source for Jim Garrison and for Oliver Stone, yet I'll suspend judgment about Fletcher Prouty and General Edward Lansdale until I've read the citations that you named, Larry. I didn't expect to read your suggestion that Edward Lansdale was in Dallas on 11/22/1963 trying to stop a JFK murder plot. I've just never read that before in the past 20 years of my JFK research. .......its certainly not widely discussed but its based in the possibility that JFK/RFK were warned that there were exiles out to get him as a traitor to their cause. You hear that from Murgado and a couple of others but if you believe JFK was told not to go to Chicago because of the threat Bolden relates, then you have to think about the fact that President's are not told what do without asking some questions....on the order of "why are you cancelling my political appearance in Chicago with no notice...explain that to me". There are several indications that JFK and RFK may have known he was at risk from exiles, that's obvious in all the concerns about the Miami trip. So if you are JFK/RFK and maybe not so sure who to trust...who might look into it for you....who do you trust who knows the guys down in Miami? How about the recent head of Mongoose. Just speculation obviously but there is no doubt JFK was a strong supporter of Lansdale, even after Mongoose. You've always got surprises, Larry. .......not that I always make people happy with them of course.....

Paul, I think you could probably wear down the most energetic poster - and that's not me - so I'll just stay with suggestions. My main suggestion is that you need to do some background reading on some of the people you discuss, such as Lansdale, outside the JFK literature. You also need to really understand the organizations that people like Lansdale and Prouty worked for - particular the SACSA function within the Joint Chiefs (Special Assistant for Counter Insurgency and Special Activities). I cover that in great detail in Shadow Warfare but that's a big book, you might try BlackOps Vietnam by Robert Gillespie as an alternative. You really do need to investigate more deeply in regard to the claims about Lansdale - and for that matter, the idea that if he was in Dallas he was there assisting a conspiracy rather than the opposite. If you do your homework I think that you will find that in 1963 Lansdale was taking no orders from anybody in the CIA and for that matter the top chain of CIA officers were trying to get the man retired early rather than having JFK keep promoting him for a key position as COS or even Ambassador to Vietnam. I'd refer you to John Prado's excellent histories including The President's Secret Wars for that sort of background. I'd also suggest you read more about Prouty, in particular read his extended interview with the ARRB. I put a copy in a CD collection available from Lancer but you should probably be able to find it online by now. As far as Mexico City, surely by this time you have read Bill Simpich's new work which is all document based, we are way past rumors and innuendo now. -- Larry

Paul, for one thing Lansdale was not really a ranking CIA officer. It is true that he was CIA Chief of Base in Saigon for a time and that he held significant political action positions in SE Asia. If anything he was much higher up in terms of his standing with JFK than within the CIA and JFK actually tried to move him up to a major position in South Viet Nam, only to be dramatically opposed by the CIA senior officers, State Department and the Joint Chiefs. In fact once JFK had put him in charge of Mongoose Lansdale really had no supporters in Washington other than JFK and possibly RFK.... All of this is detailed in the histories that deal with Lansdale - and some good books on Vietnam. I consolidate a good deal of it in Shadow Warfare. I'm not going into the Lansdale in Dallas thing but first off, Lansdale was not in any sort of chain of command for the CIA in 1963, he had been isolated a good deal by being selected and supported by JFK and because of that he really was not trusted by the Chiefs, the top CIA guys or the top State guys. You will find all of this in history books outside JFK works. I think you said you had purchased NEXUS and if so you will find out the clear chain of CIA officers that I propose were involved - and more importantly how they were involved - starting with Angleton, then through Harvey, then down to Morales and further down to people like Robinson and possibly Sforza. To what extent Angleton talked about JFK as a security risk and the need to do something about him with Dulles will never be known - and given the standard practices of those people, the words they used would have been very vague. Angleton might talk about JFK as a risk, by the time the conversation gets carried to Miami by Harvey and he and Morales are talking it would get much more definitive....in assassination directives people like Dulles always said "eliminate" and by the time it got down the chain the translation would be made to "kill". With apologies for repeating myself, SWHT done in 2010, is a bottoms up study. NEXUS, done two years later is tops down and much more tightly focused on CIA assassination practices and how that translates into the murder of JFK. SWHT is context and presents some 12 or more years of background research, NEXUS is how I think the conspiracy jelled and was carried out. -- Larry

Paul, just for reference, we know of very few official, sanctioned CIA assassination projects. One we do know of was personally authorized by Dwight Eisenhower to Mr. Dulles. Aside from Dulles and one headquarters case officer, the only other people involved were one individual from CIA tech services who carried poison to the Congo, one Chief of Base in the Congo who was simply advised of the action and surprised by it and two street level assets from Europe who were to deliver the poison, both smugglers, one a probable drug dealer and both tasked with assassination as their first time project for the Agency. And the plan failed to poison Patrice Lemumba in any event. I wouldn't get to carried away with that rogues gallery thing, although I do not maintain that Dallas was any sort of official CIA project I do assert senior officers were involved....but in virtually all known CIA assassination efforts, successful and not, the people who did the street level work could probably be described as "rogues", you might meet them in a bar but it would not be one in Fairfax Virginia. .

If you have not read Bamford's "The Shadow Factory" I would recommend it. In addition to the details of the metadata and related collections he explores the political pressures and agendas applied to the NSA to push for some of the most abusive measures. Objectively, pre-911 the NSA was turning down all sorts of requests to share data or collect more data based on privacy issues...but then the Bush Administration and Congress came along and that was the end of that. The NSA is a government agency and like any other agency, it bends to pressure - Bamford does a fine job of pointing out just exactly where and who has been originating the pressure... Combining that book with his earlier book "A Pretext for War" gives a great context to how the NSA - just like the CIA - can be leveraged via politics and related agendas.

Tommy, actually Vinson was recruited in a logistics staff role for the SR-52 Blackbird testing at Area 51 in Nevada....the CIA was in charge of development but the Air Force was running the facility. The long and short of it is that he was put through advanced security screening for that highly secret project. As to the 1963 story, there are so many issues with it that even after multiple contacts with his lawyer and attempts to talk with him I just gave up. Having been in the Air Force myself some of them were easy to spot.....I think he's sincere but I just can't parse it all out....but I'm pretty sure no transport landed where he said it did at the height of the assassination furore without being noticed and that the second landing did not occur at a SAC base operating at Defcon 3 and the passengers deplane and casually walk over to the flight ops building without about 50 armed SAC air police having them flat on the ground first. I will say it has the feel of disinformation, but it should not have all those issues if it were put together by professionals. I can also say that the book as published has some variances from the notes that I took of the video his lawyer showed impromptu during lunch at a Lancer conference.

After working the issue of the Vinson story from its inception, contacting his lawyer numerous times over the years and responding to Vinson's offer to deal with questions and issues published in his book - and receiving no reply - I can positively that there are a great many issues with it, including the fact that Vinson could not differentiate what was going on with his recruitment to the SR71 program and the CIA security checking associated with that from his story of 1963. I admire Douglas a lot but I wish there had been a chance to have some dialog with him on certain of his items, such as the Vinson story, before he went to press. -- Larry

In response to posting the HSCA material, here's the way it goes...about 1998 I ordered a ton of files from NARA in regard to Vallee, it included all the contemporary Chicago material from 1963, follow on SS annual investigative reports because they checked on him for years afterwards, all the HSCA related documents etc. I spent month examining the whole story - many years later I located and talked to Vallee relatives. At the moment, the HSCA reports I refer to are smashed together amoung a ton of other folders in tertiary storage in my garage and honestly I have nither the time nor energy to go looking for them. And if I did I don't have a scanner... Perhaps someone else can find copies of them online, I myself only saw paper copies and I assumed they would be among what is on line at MFF. The HSCA did seriously consider the Vallee story because there had been media coverage of it, and there were Chicago documents. But I'm afraid all I can do is give you my recollection on it. I'll also mention one more time that Vallee himself came to the attention of the SS because he shot off his mouth about the fact that something needed to be done about JFK while he was having a meal in a bowling alley - the guy next too him thought he was a nut case and might be dangerous so he reported it.....

Of all the things we don't know, we have some pretty good circumstantial information on at least one person who had good looking Secret Service credentials in the fall of 1963, who hated JFK, who was connected to the peripheral set of OP 40 players around David Morales, who had been one of the very few independents to actually conduct combat missions into Cuba and who later admitted that he had gone to Dallas in November as part of the conspiracy against JFK - Roy Hargraves. Hoover managed to duck the report on Hargraves just as he tried to do on Odio, with the questions of witness reliability. Its a darn shame Gaeton Fonzi didn't know about the Hargraves lead as he did Odio. And of course for those who like photos, I'm still saying that one of the mystery men down on the curb looks a lot like Hargraves. Given that Morales had worked CI at JMWAVE, had actually worked with Angleton, had trained the AMMOTS who ran counter intel in Miami and did work in Mexico City and that they were equipped with false identification for such tasks - not to mention that Morales good friend Sforza was actually their boss in 1963 I'm pretty comfortable if that gang wanted to send Hargraves and others to Dallas with fake SS identification it would have been no big challenge. Heck, they had worked directly with the Secret Service in the enhanced protective services in Miami that fall - and if memory serves Vince has even dug up indications that some SS ID had gone missing at that point in time. Might be as simple as lifting it during a side trip to the right sort of bar in Miami, something known to be a practice of the WHD. -- Larry