Larry Hancock

As I recall, Ellsworth was in a meeting with Hosty that morning, where they were all trying to get their act together in regard to the Nonte/Masen gun sales sting. Afterwards, he and one of the people in the meeting had gone somewhere a couple of blocks away from the Plaza and were eating lunch when they began to hear a commotion and then about the shooting.... Several of his statements are available and I certainly don't remember anything about his being on the knoll quickly or encountering an agent there. -- Larry

Fruge talked to Fritz in Dallas while he was following up on the Cherimie incident and in particular her drug deal report which was something still in progress at the time; the freighter was still on its way into Houston. His remarks are in regard to something he remembered Fritz commenting on during the call. I'm not exactly sure why that would come up in the conversation. I also have no recollection as to why Smith would have been immediately investigated by DPD immediately following the assassination; does anyone have a DPD record on that? All I can recall is that he was approached by DPD later in regard to whether he would provide information during the Garrison investigation as Garrison had subpoenaed him. It would be good to see someone lay out the chronology of these elements.

The JFK Lancer site itself is up and going considerable redesign and rework - there are new sections a whole new area of contemporary interviews ranging from John Newman to Gerry McKnight, all done in the last few months. That's were the effort is going at the moment. Alan Dale is putting up at least a couple of major hour long interviews a month. No idea about the forum itself, and yes Deb's health is an issue. The site work and interviews are being done by others at this point and will definitely be continuing, the forum is a separate story. -- Larry

Well after considerable study of INTERARMCO I think its safe to say if the boxes had their markings, they contained weapons and not explosives. And it is verifiable that the CIA continued to that company as a source for deniable weapons through 1964 in Cuban exile activities... It is worth noting that on other and earlier operations, as in "Archipelago" in Indonesia, when crates of weapons with their markings turned up, Cummings told the press that he had nothing to do with the Agency so they much have been using his company as a type of cover....shows the man had a sense of humor. -- Larry

Interesting point on the "dime" David, Ian Griggs tried reassembly on his Carcano in the fashion indicated by the WCR and discovered that while it could be done with a dime that it certainly could not be done - especially in a hurry and under stress - without leaving scratch marks on the metal around the screw housing. And there are no such apparent scratch marks on the weapon officially in evidence..

Tommy, actually my thought would be that it would be nice to have some master archives of all the tangents and leads that still chew up peoples time because, as we all know, nothing ever goes away on the internet. My sympathies go out to anybody coming into this subject relatively new - it took me over a decade to start separating wheat from chaff and there was a lot less chaff when I started...grin. I do recall that the fellow ducking was identified, James will probably recall who - I think it was a family member of one of the folks in the group but it surely was not LHO. It's deep in my my memory stack to dredge it up. In a similar vein, I recall when I took all the "looks like" photos from DP really seriously and was convinced that Sturgis was one of the tramps, then during my Interpen photo collection period I came across a photo of Stugis with Diaz Lantz and Diaz Lantz's brother and son of a gun, the brother looked even more like the tall tramp than Sturgis! At that point I began to be a lot less adamant about photo matches...

It really is amazing how these things keep resurfacing year after year. Then again its been perhaps three years before we' ve been though this same film cycle - James may remember better than I. In any event, its really old news and goes back to a series of PR events that Sturgis and Hemming were holding to try and raise money. They invited photographers, did "training" sessions like parachute drops and invited the press - some of the jumps came out rather badly as I recall. This is during a period in which Sturgis and Hemming were promoting their "brigade" which never existed per se but was a nice PR tag line for their fund raising. Being of strong character the two could never hang together for too long and of course Sturgis did become an active CIA informant for Barker not long afterwards and may have been even then. Scott is right in associating it with the Brigade but these sorts of activities have nothing to do with OP40 which was entirely different, tied to the BOP and which produced no "media" events like the one associated with this film... Anyone really wanting to understand the context of the Sturgis/Hemming activities might spend a few months going though all the Miami papers for the period, its very educational. My friend Bill Bretz did that and then copied me with about 50 pounds of the relevant articles a good number of years ago..... -- Larry

Thanks Josh, that's really interesting. I was aware of Mooney's comments on the power but this is the first indication I've seen that any officer entered the Pullman cars, or searched them - well it sort of sounds like Bone went though them all but you can't really tell. I'd be fascinated by any interview of that porter. Also, Bowers certainly didn't mentioned any officer approaching him in the tower - that's new as far as I am aware too. -- Larry

Alyea's observations are especially interesting in that he is very adamant about the fact that the police not only mishandled evidence but screwed up the official crime scene so badly that the boxes in the "snipers nest" had to be re-staged and the photos taken over again...which of course is not mentioned in any of the police statements or official record. Alyea's felt so strongly about this that he published a series of at least three newsletters addressing issues of the photographs and police mistakes. However the newsletters also addressed his belief that Oswald was the sole shooter and there was no conspiracy and that much conspiracy writing was bogus and self serving. I tried to introduce the contradiction in accepting all the evidence offered to the record at the same time challenging some of the most basic police practices but he wasn't much open to that - we did have a good Mexican lunch during the dialog though... -- Larry

Sorry Tommy, missed your PPS at first read so I'll make a couple of observations. First off, in regard to the Veciana remarks, if I recall correctly he primarily assumed Oswald was there to discuss what he was there for - which was ongoing assassination plans against Castro. That was an ongoing agenda between Veciana and Phillips not only in 1963 but for years afterwards up the similar plots in Latin America. Veciana only observed "Oswald" as he was leaving and my view would be that any meeting between Oswald and Phillips would have had more to do with spy games against the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City which Phillips was running, with propaganda against the FPCC which Phillips was taking over in his new assignment or just possible some tangential activities in the AM/SANTA project which involved seeding assets with FPCC credentials into Cuba via the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. Second, a good deal of what Phillips did in later years was "situational" and in response to various Congressional investigations. His "unpublished" manuscript may well have been a signal to the Agency or to certain people at high levels in the agency not to hang him out to the HSCA - or that they better stonewall the HSCA. He played a key role in bolstering the legal defense for former intelligence personnel, which helped prevent any panic during the Congressional inquires but Phillips may also have felt it necessary to protect himself by essentially drawing a line in the sand for the Agency. It is also interesting that he appears to have directed at least one author towards David Morales - something that upset Morales a great deal. We have to respect Phillips capabilities in disinformation and in running multiple concurrent games. Third, and in answer to your question, my speculation is that Oswald had continued to talk to the same individuals or persons representing them as connected to the individuals he had met in New Orleans - who claimed to be Cuban G2. Given that his experience in Mexico City had not turned out nearly as well as his propaganda efforts in New Orleans, he may have been interested in following up with them and very possibly was pitched with a plan to get him into Cuba - such a contact would have made him once again of great interest to Phillips and the Agency. I do think something was in play with him but I don't think he had any real clue about an actual attack on the President. -- Larry

Yates did not wait weeks to take his story to the FBI although he did wait until he could go along with his lawyer; I can't give a specific date from memory as to when the FBI actually interviewed Yates but his friend Dempsey Jones was interviewed by the FBI on Nov. 27 so that suggests Yates was into the FBI office no later than say the Tuesday following the assassination. Jones confirmed that Yates had related the encounter to him prior to the assassination. Yates also passed a polygraph on his remarks. Wherever else the story goes, it seems pretty clear that Yates did have some sort of encounter with an individual who made remarks about the President's upcoming visit, about a potential assassination attempt ...perhaps most interesting is that Dempsey confirmed that Yates had told him before the shooting that the young man he had picked up said he had window shades in the package. and that the young man was dropped off at the corner of Houston and Elm. That's a interesting dose of coincidence... -- Larry

Tommy, I really have no doubt from Rose's record that she worked both as a prostitute, in a number of hustles and scams and as a drug connection in the network that ran from Miami, though New Orleans, into Texas, and which shuttled drugs up though Texas and Oklahoma into the mid-west. I'm certain the drug deal was just as she described it, as I report in SWHT, the only reason they didn't bust it and avoided it after the fact was that the DEA guy assigned to shadow the guy off the ship blew his assignment...after that DEA wanted to just drop the whole embarrassing thing. The big question, did Rose hear talk about threats against JFK, I suspect she did, that talk was common in a bunch of places she traveled through, including Miami, We have all sorts of reports of such talk. But was her trip involved int he actual Dallas plot, I don't think so, I think it was all about the drug deal... Larry

Pat, it would be interesting to look at total sales but I suspect you would find that Posner leads most of the others you listed by a large margin...of course as John Simkin points out, it could also depend on how and where they do their searching, what their editorial guidance was and who shows up first. Still, would be interesting to rank sales. Gary's position is critical for his visibility, as is the fact that the museum does have a goodly number of available film and other resources. McAdams would certainly show up quickly in any search on the subject....as John's notes on searching suggest. Actually the few referrals I get generally come via Lancer because it shows up in many searches. I may indeed be wrong on book sales and perhaps it is largely a search phenomena, I do know for sure though that most media outlets keep lists of individuals to be used as resources on certain subjects, which is one reason some of the same people show up over and over. Now having said that, I'm not naive enough to think that the selection of individuals does not have some match to the editorial direction of the show....I'd also point out that a great number of folks in this years specials were from within the media itself or had some link to the contemporary coverage of the assassination or the Kennedy administration. All of which is idle speculation against one outstanding fact, the news media are simply not going to stand up one day and say hey, we, the established networks, news services and our whole industry plus all of our most respected predecessors and the people who received our awards over the last few decades - including the most beloved nightly news figures in America - missed the biggest investigative story of the last century - but trust us, we are on top of it now. That is just not going to happen. The most you are going to get is just what we got - hey, I might have missed something but nobody else has come up with any solid proof of conspiracy so its unlikely we will ever know for sure. Which of course is just about the best we did get. The worst was, hey, lets look at the Russians and Cubans again. And if you haven't fully realized how badly we got had on that, read Jim D's review of Shenon's (sp?) Warren Commission book on CTKA.

John, my experience with the media is that in many cases they assign a research assistant who just googles books on the subject and picks authors who have the best sales, calls them up and that's about it. I've worked with a number of program folks over the last few years - for minor things like radio and a few articles, my books don't sell well enough to bet me on even a B call list - but its pretty clear how things work. I've had two entertaining experiences that seemed to validate that view. I got booked on to a radio broadcast because some assistant assumed that the title "Someone Would Have Talked" suggested I was obviously someone to speak against the possibility of conspiracy - the host was neither pleased nor happy, the interview certainly didn't go with his plan and a tense time was had by all. In another instance a major British publishing house wanted me to edit a book on conspiracy - after a bit of email exchange it turned out they wanted to do a "laugh at the conspiracy nutcases" book. Once my views became clear to the the calls stopped and the job went to somebody else...darn. Experts, in media terms, often seem to be defined as the people who sell the most books, make the most entertaining media appearances (read "attitude") and/or have positions or a historical presence that validate the individual's authority - having worked in advertising it seems rather similar to the selection of spokespersons. Perhaps I'm a bit too cynical but I don't think the depth of background research is all that great - then again that's because I never get the calls Posner does...grin. That's humorous, the fact that Gerry McKnight and John Newman don't get them is just plain sad.

Daniel, I'm not going to get into a battle or debate over the subject of the wounds or the film other than what I have in SWHT. That makes it pretty clear that I believe there was work on the head before the official autopsy began and also that the Z film itself strongly suggests multiple shooters, as was observed at NPIC - for that matter in viewing it I still think it suggests multiple shooters and when I show it to a novice they intuitively come to the same conclusion. What I was trying to point out and what always is that we have have had a variety of speakers on all sides of the medical topic and film at Lancer conferences for ages. And honestly as speaker chair I think its important people know that. Heck the first Z film alteration panel was at a Lancer conference well before I have became speaker chair. William Law and Debra's early interviews with the Autopsy staff members from Bethesda did a great deal to challenge the official story line and Jenkins came because William Law was presenting on those interviews. He and the others from Bethesda have always been welcome and several of them have spoken before. Jim knew he would have a receptive forum and went further this time than he ever had before. And of course as you noted Tink was there presented and David Mantik held a focus group on his topics. We try to shoot for a lot of balance at the conference and certainly there are speakers who present information from across the spectrum. That's really all I wanted to say and I hope the thread can go back to its focus, I'll shut up at this point.

Daniel, actually Bill Miller reached the same general conclusion as Tink has recently and presented it at a Lancer conference several years ago, - had to remember - perhaps five years. Using excellent quality Z film frames he demonstrated what most felt was a large wound at the back of the head, as well as material coming off the rear of the head during the shooting. That has been very consistent with most of the medical presentations about the head wound by individuals present at Parkland who have presented at the conferences - certainly including Dr. McClellan's presentation. -- Larry

Actually Burkley did prepare a report on his activities and observations and he did it quite early, Nov. 27 1963 to be exact. It makes an interesting comparison to Captain Young's comments. You can read it all at: http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=629&relPageId=1

That's sort of what I was guessing Pat, in other words Clarke is really just repeating and paraphrasing - but the article certainly does not present it that way to my reading. I will be interested in your comments about other aspects of the article - which to me seems to have lots of problems.

Ray, I've posted a lengthy interview with Captain Young in a different thread...he makes a number of medical and evidence assertions that strike me worth note but so far I've not gotten any assessment. Hopefully David Lifton, Pat and others will jump in with observations and assessments. Captain Young writes as if he was a primary observer and I'm also curious about that and other records of his testimony on Parkland and Bethesda.

I'm bumping this back up to get further comment, Pat Speer, David Mantik and a good number of other members should have something to offer on this interview which seems to claim to be equally authoritative to Dr. Burkley's observations and offers what seem to me to be a lot of questionable or at least contrary observations. Given his assertive statements surely he was questioned by the WC, by the ARRB etc. I'd really appreciate some feedback on what would seem to be a serious autopsy source offering information such as the finding and delivery of a shell from the limo plus a number of other things....

Someone forwarded this to me and I'd like to see comments from folks who focus on the autopsy. It seemed to me there were some factual errors even in the first few paragraphs and I'm curious as to whether anyone has ever contacted Captain Young or evaluated this interview? https://ia801001.us.archive.org/28/items/NMAndTheKennedyAssassination/NM%20and%20the%20Kennedy%20Assassination.pdf

That's fascinating stuff John, so MFF, which is almost entirely actual released government documents has a lower domain authority than McAdams site but also a very much lower domain authority than the news sources - or Amazon for that matter. So, primary government documents and investigative reports would have half the authority of Wikipedia and considerably less than the commercial news site or Amazon. Could you check out where the National Security Archive site stands. In any event, it certainly looks like that was a very effective way of neutralizing primary source material. One can ponder who the Domain Authority gurus are? - Thanks for sharing your research, Larry

I'll try an to combine thoughts on this one. First, I thank that the conspirators were very much aware of Oswald, beginning with his activities in New Orleans. They may very well have connected with him in a guise that he didn't recognize or simply as one set of contacts out of many he was making. Distinguishing a couple of Cuban exiles with a story line from several other sets would have been very difficult for him. The information from the Parrot Jungle incident does suggest that exiles in Miami were not only aware of and talking about Oswald but had some fair amount of timely detail since in that incident his whereabouts are described as either in Mexico or Texas, which was really quite accurate given his recent travels of the period. I also take the Patterson comment from Hosty of Oswald being observed with "subversives" very seriously. However none of that suggests that Oswald was doing more than talking to people who matched his interests, which that fall certainly included things Cuban. I've come to think he was very much "unknowingly" patsied in the Dallas attack. As to the Army connections you and Mark mentioned, after having spent an immense amount of time on the 112th Army documents, I an say that they show virtually all of the Army intelligence was material that had been copied to them out of New Orleans, first when an officer picked up a leaflet from Oswald's first Navy pier effort and then as the FBI began to copy the 112th on his activities and their investigation of his FPCC activities in Dallas. Those memos included the speculation that Hidell and Oswald were both suspects in that or that Oswald might be using the Hidell name. Remember that it was Army intelligence who was tasked with monitoring the students who were illegally going in and out of Cuba, sometimes with FPCC assistance. Illegal Cuba travel in or out was one of their tasks in domestic intelligence. Most of the other stuff in the Army files is communication between Dallas and the 112th after the assassination. Simpich is also demonstrating in his work that the Army and Navy were both copied on some of the Mexico City related memos, but certainly not all of them. Having said all that, its pretty clear that the real major missing military files are from the ONI, that ONI did have a large file on him, that they investigated after his "defection" and that those files have never surfaced. My personal speculation is that the reason they did not is that they do or did contain info on Oswald reporting his bar girl contacts in Japan and the possibility that he was requested to make follow on reports ....that's important in terms of my speculation that he first became visible to the CIA's during his visits to the area of and possible attempts to actually enter the Soviet embassy in Tokyo. I don't want to mislead anyone with this thread though, while "Shadow Warfare" is about a great number of the CIA officers and Cuban exiles we are familiar with from the early 60's and follows all of them for a much greater period of time....including discussing several of their infrastructure warfare activities in both Vietnam and Latin America though the 70's, its not another JFK assassination book. -- so I may be "huckstering" with the thread, but at least with full disclosure...grin Larry

Chris, I think in terms of the genesis of the idea that JFK was becoming dangerous and perhaps "out of control" I'd look at Helms and Angleton, Helms had been adamant in opposing and pushing back against any dialog with Castro to neutralize Cuba. Helms may well have shared such thoughts with Dulles, but its also certain that he would have shared with such thoughts with Angleton. I went though a good deal of thought about this in NEXUS. My take is that the concerns passed from Angleton who passed the paranoia and worries to Harvey (supposedly Angleton only really talked to Helms and Harvey) - who passed it down to Morales and Roselli and then... Morales had extensive experience as an Ops manager and Roselli had his own skills as a "facilitator". Both were pros. Operationally I would think it would have been someone highly trusted and the person in that position surely would be Robertson, from then on it would go down to the people who Robertson had personally worked and who he trusted. In terms of the operational team it would be a match of skills and trust. Another comment I would make, which I explore at length in Shadow Warfare, is that in real Agency executive action, the CIA officers were always directors and coordinators, surrogates did the lethal action.

For those interested, I've begun a new series of posts introducing my new book - written with Stu Wexler - "Shadow Warfare". The posts are on my blog at: http://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/shadow-warfare-2/ The book is a broad study of American covert action and undeclared warfare beginning prior to WWII and extending to contemporary activities as of 2013. Its going to come out close to 600 pages rather than the initial 350 page estimate on Amazon and has some 800 citations/end notes. Which seems a lot but then it does cover 70 years and that's a good deal of covert action. I will also try to relate portions of it to things of interest in JFK research, today's post comments on the larger picture of David Phillips activities across some 13 years of association with Antonio Veciana. I won't burden folks with extensive descriptions of it here, that will be in the blog posts. In the interesting of shameless huckstering, it is available for pre-order on Amazon and pre-orders are always appreciated... Larry