Larry Hancock

I want to second Steve's remarks, I have no doubt Ray's heart is in the right place and I hope things work out for him. He seems to be the sort of fellow who I would enjoy having spent some time in a pub with and I wish him the best, Larry

It seems relevant for me to note the experience of my friend Connie Kritzberg during the first 24 hours of the assassination. A reporter in Dallas, she had written up an interview very clearly describing a shot from the front. She turned her story in at the end of the day, knowing it might be the most important news piece she would ever write, and was horrified to see that the next morning, when it appeared in print, that the wording had been changed. Not a big change, simply a tweak in the wording to make the indication of a frontal shot less conclusive. She recognized the change immediately and called her editor who pushed back declaring he had not changed her wording. After her pushing him a bit more he told her that if she had any issues about the whole thing she would need to contact the FBI. Later her research into the various iterations of her copy suggested that her story had been read over the phone to someone and edited outside the paper itself. Of course she has no solid proof of that but she is absolutely certain her copy was changed, her editor denied he had done it so as far as she is concerned, it remains an very open question. -- Larry

Thanks to further info and dialog with Bill and Zach Robertson I've now posted a more detailed piece in regard to Hal Feeny and the complexity of Cuba secret war activities on my blog....

I'm going to "fourth" all this, either the fellow is incredibly ignorant of virtually all contemporary historical work or he has such a political agenda that none of it matters...based on what I see in most of the talking heads these days, I'm betting on the latter....still, on a national level its just flat embarrassing...

I thought I should pitch in a bit more detail on Hal Finney/Fenney which explains who he was working for at what point in time.... Hal Finney/Feeney) was base commander at Guantanamo in the period following the BOP and worked with Morales. Thanks to my friend Bill Simpich we have some very interesting info on his activities but the most important thing is that he was not CIA, rather he was working with CIA in sabotage operations against Cuba, first in support of maritime missions for Mongoose (Cobra and AMTORRID under Harvey). It is very possible it was those missions that got Harvey fired for maritime operations during the missile crisis. Following the Mongoose era Finney/Feeney moved into the DIA taking over Cuba projects then moved into a role under the Joint Chiefs in unconventional warfare…no doubt still in contact with Morales. It’s important to recall that following the “switchback” directive from JFK, the Joint Chiefs and SACSA were going to carry the responsibility for covert military ops around the globe. They picked that up in Vietnam and that is the same group that Morales worked for after his return from SE Asia. I try to deal with the impact of this change in Shadow Warfare, it played a major role in moving CIA into a support role, especially in counter insurgency. But for our purposes it also explains the tight relationship between Feeney and JMWAVE and Morales as of the summer and fall of 1963. I’ll blog in more detail about this when I have a chance and put in some of the document links Bill has been good enough to collect on Feeney -- and all the very interesting and under discussed military actions he, Harvey and Morales seem to have touched in 62/63....some of which were intended to trigger military action against Cuba and one of which involved Felipe Vidal among others.

I feel that I should add that Robert may well not know about Piper's personal interactions with Debra - its often good to have first hand information about a situation before making assumptions as to motive and causes. And that is all I'm saying about that...

In regard to a presentation at the Lancer forum, I can;t make any commitments - we have been booked with speakers for months and have several folks on a waiting list. However, we do have two rooms available and are doing focus groups in the second room. If someone would like to email me a proposal for getting together a study group on the fellow back in the shadows as well as the overall issues of encounters inside the TSBD I can certainly discuss it with Deb and see what we can come up with. The whole purpose of the conference is to foster research and dialog and this surely fits. -- Larry

Sean, a great post and a very interesting line of research. As I mentioned earlier, first reports always outweigh later memories. And in my book first reports of the first day outweigh just about everything else given to the certain phenomena of "convergence" - in other words if everybody else says they saw something then I must have misremembered. In the JFK murder that started quite quite quickly because both the DPD and FBI were pushing for evidence against Oswald, not a broad, wide open investigation. Perhaps not so much DPD the first 48 hours but with the Hoover memo of Saturday morning the FBI clearly had its orders to focus on a case against Oswald. And Hoover clearly wanted to bring the DPD in line ASAP. -- keep at it, Larry

Well I can say that Rip will be one of the figures whose career I trace over several decades in my forthcoming book Shadow Warfare. I'll also say that Frank's book is a great source on the exiles in the Congo as will as Castro's forces there - I deal with both the CIA operations in the Congo and Angola in the book. I have certain doubts about the diamond story because we know a good deal about the official dispatch of Rip and the Low Beam team to the Congo as well as the Makasi air operations and the Cuban exile boat group sent there. Those were very much CIA organized and controlled. of course Rip may have stayed behind for a bit to try and heist some diamonds, that would be an interesting story. But at the time he was an acting CIA employee with a day job. The Cuban exile "assets" working for a case officer had a lot more flexibility to shift between Agency assignments and on side projects, something I illustrate in the book with some information about Felix Rodriquez. For those that want more detailed information on Low Beam and the concurrent Dragon Rouge operations in the Congo there is a very good military history study of it from Levenworth press although it may be out of print, ,my copy is from years ago.

To weigh in on this is a bit more detail, in SWHT I present what I think is an extremely strong circumstantial case that Phillips did use the Bishop alias beginning in Cuba while he was for years after that. Phillips admitted to using an alias in Cuba and to working with a rebel group wanting to assassinate Castro, a perfect fit for the known Veciana contact inside Cuba. Keep in mind that in his undercover position any alias Phillips used could well have been local, not a CIA crypt or even necessarily a formal assigned alias - he was deep undercover, not using a backstopped cover of any sort, say as Morales was doing at the same time in Havana, assigned to the U.S. embassy. But the connection goes years beyond that, with a strong case that Phillips continued to use both Veciana and Luis Posada in Castro assassination projects in Latin America, even after he moved into much higher positions as a country station chief and then division chief for the region. Veciana is on record that he was amazed that as a legally restricted exile, restricted to Florida, someone managed to get him a job down there, and with AID for that matter. Its going to take Phillips to do that sort of thing... To see the connections between some of these folks, its necessary to look way beyond just the Cuba secret war projects of the early 60's, their agenda continued for many years beyond that, possibly sanctioned but in the case of Phillips, very possibly not... -- Larry

Thanks Steve, and I agree with you, I don't think it was taken as anything more than doing their job by the reporters, However if you read Shackley's memo as well as get a handle on the broader media goals of the Agency, you can see they used the contacts quite effectively' to plant information. Of course that;s always a two way street and always will be, but where it crosses the line is where the CIA officers let their own views and agendas get into it. I've written about how the Backstage with Bobby article was very likely an attempt by Shackley or Phillips, most likely Shackley to sabotage RFK's autonomous group project - and it did exactly that. -- Larry

Just to advise everyone, the Lancer forum has returned to operation....

In addition to Phillips, Hal Hendrix had a direct relation to Ted Shackly, in fact William Pawley identified Shackly as the primary source for Hendrix on Cuban affairs. Hendrix was just one of the local media folks that Shackley used as channels and we even have a memo of his talking about how successful he had been in his local media outreach. We also know a lot about his movements and he would not have been inside Cuba making the initial contacts that Veciana describes...

I'm really enjoying this thread and I have been skeptical in regard to many elements of the Baker encounter for a number of years. Even trivial things like whether or not a civilian like Truly is going to sprint up several sets of stairs (each floor had a shorter double set) ahead of a police officer who has his pistol drawn. Cambell's statement has always gotten my attention since it showed up immediately in news reports. I think we also have a good deal of instances where witness testimony tends to "converge" around the official story after the first day or so, you can see that in comparing first day statements with latter testimony. But in addition to that, I would like to repeat the cautions about memory and witness reliablity from a post I put up on my blog some time ago. Its caution about using anything other than essentially first day or so memories is something we need to take very seriously. The blog entry follows: I've been doing some reading recently on the reliability of witness testimony, an issue that has fragmented our research for decades. For reference on the subject, I would heartily recommend Sherry Fiester's new book Enemy of the Truth - which contains a detailed professional analysis of just what you can and cannot expect from ear and eye witnesses. Sherry draws on her career in criminology and forensics for this and we really need to pay attention to her. But beyond what we can expect from first hand witnesses, the other major issue is the time factor. In one classroom study, the instructor staged an impromptu incident and asked his class to record what they had seen happen over the course of a minute or so. The incident actually involved someone running in and firing a gun at the instructor, with blanks. The students immediately recorded their impressions and the results were actually quite good in terms of accuracy and similarity of observations. However, when asked to write down their observations within only a week of time passing, all sorts of changes began to show up - number of shots fired, dialog heard, and the clothing of the instructor and assailant. Not only did the individual descriptions start to change significantly but there was no longer general agreement among the witnesses. In 1986 a psychology instructor performed a similar experiment following the Challenger disaster, a test of what is referred to as "flashbulb" memory. He then filed their responses for three years and repeated the same questions with the students. In comparing the two sets of responses, a quarter of the class did not have a single memory a year later that matched their initial response. In some instances students became quite irate, admitting that there was an issue but aggressively defending their current memory over their original statements. Clearly this must be a caution for all historical research. While many of us have long stressed first day evidence, we should probably be more candid about first day memories. We have a host of interviews with witness beginning days, weeks, months and years later. The real question is if they were not on record as of Nov 22 or possibly Nov 23, can we really rely on them, especially without some sort of independent corroboration? -- Larry PS...the Challenger study was done at Emory University by Professor Ulric Neisser

David,. I don't know about the Education forum but a lot of new folks show up at Lancer...and its not unusual for them to bring up topics or even people who have been discussed repeatedly and in great depth - it saves a lot of time if we can just send them to review those exchanges on their own. Some of them also contain content from first and second generation researchers who are no longer with us or active online. A number of the threads also have extensive photo and other links embedded in them. -- Larry

Here's another: http://www.dealeyplazauk.org.uk/pdfA...hn%20Masen.pdf http://www.dealeyplazauk.org.uk/pdfA...hn%20Masen.pdf http://www.dealeyplazauk.org/pdfa...hn%20.Masen.pdf

Thanks for the photo Tommy, I don't recall seeing it before....I don't see any real resemblance to Oswald, what does everybody else think? That also gives me some pause in regard to the second report, from Sulphur Oklahoma only a week or so before the assassination which placed Ocarberrio in company with someone resembling Oswald. I really don't see that you can confuse the two - but perhaps others see more of a resemblance?

Sorry Tommy, it should have read "the actual agent"... I'm not sure about Orcarberrio resembling Oswald, would have to see a photo. Once I saw a Masen photo I couldn't understand how Dick thought he resembled Oswald.....

Good work Tommy and we can independently confirm that....check pages 78 and 79 in SWHT. Actually my source was a very interesting but limited print bio on Buddy Walthers by Eric Tagg titled Brush with Destiny, he confirmed the location and the story with Walthers family. To expand on the matter a bit, that house was in no way a "safe house" for anybody - that is a really overused term but I won't belabor the point here. It was a house rented as you describe above and simply visited, starting a week or two before the assassination by a considerable number of Cuban exiles affiliated with both DRE and Alpha 66. Some of those exiles were clearly under observation by the FBI in the sting they were running on Mason (courtesy of Nonte as an informant), one of the Alpha 66 types was also a voluntary FBI informant but as I point out in the book most likely would better have been considered a suspect. There is some reason the FBI may have actually had the house under observation. Anyway, Walther's mother in law commented that many of the visits were late at night and that one visitor resembled Oswald...that is quite interesting since the timing of that observation fits well with Hosty's remark about Oswald being seen with "subversives", now how would Hosty know that? He might well have known it because the actually FBI agent running CI on such folks including the exiles was named Heitman....interestingly enough Heitman was pulled off some investigations he was doing and assigned to the JFK investigation for some six months after the assassination. Now you might wonder why it would take months since the FBI made their report in weeks? And what Heitman was doing all those months since Oswald was not his beat. Well so do I...grin. One might also wonder why none of Heitman's pre assassination reports are available....or for that matter why very little is available on the exile community in Dallas pre-assassination. Since I don't get to do wild speculation that often, I'll just make a guess that the explanation might be that Lee Oswald might have indeed been dangled to Cuban exiles in Dallas who were engaged in guy buying, a major focus for the FBI at the time and one having nothing to do with Hosty. Indeed, as in New Orleans, Oswald's informant file in such matters would have been held very separate from his case file, the one Hosty would have had access to. And Hosty's remark about the subversives an that investigation being communicated to the Secret Service...which it was not...was innocent enough when he made it since he would have had no idea of the real implications. Hosty was a nice fellow and very open to talking, the only thing I never got him to comment on in our chats was the copy of the document on his remarks about subversives that I provided to him. -- Larry

I'd say you were right on Tommy....and unfortunately the FBI does it fairly routinely as well. Very dangerous to convert three and four word names to one or two as we are more familiar with, often leads to confusion...well that and the fact that the name Hernandez was apparently as common as the name Smith used to be...

First off, with the US arrival date Bill posted I think we can write Soto Martiniz out of La. or at least specifically out of the abortive McClaney sponsored bombing raid given that the trailer with the explosives for that which was raided on the McClaney farm on July 31. McClaney had been very active with a number of exiles that summer, trying to stage raids against Cuba - exactly why is unclear but several of those he contacted, such as Carlos Hernandez, were well placed in the DRE. Things get confusing because apparently his brothers property was being used by a number of people...I go into that in some detail in SWHT ....Chris's guy above would have been involved in a separate incident from that of the explosives in the U Haul and the "childish and incompetent" bombing plan...as described by Hernandez who was a pilot. McClaney really did not have the experience for this sort of thing and attracted a small following more with money than anything else. On the other hand, some of the individuals who did spend some time in his plans and who did travel from Miami to New Orleans and back that summer, such as Victor Hernandez, are some of my main suspects in carrying word back to Miami about Oswald's high visibility activities in New Orleans. My suspicion is that Soto Martinez heard some of those same guys talking about Oswald and just repeated it while attempting to chat up Lillian. I've always considered it to be a major per-assassination lead, confirming that Oswald was known and even being gossiped about in some detail by certain exiles in Miami with connections to multiple groups including both DRE and Alpha 66. I should also note that McClaney had a documented connection to Roy Hargraves, and if anyone has not researched Hargraves, you should Of course what Soto Martinez would not have known was that some of them had decided to put Oswald into play as a patsy, as early as September. Finally another source on all this is Dan Christienson, a Miami reporter who did a great deal of follow on work with all parties involved, bottom line is that the FBI clearly backed away from this lead as they did with several others....since it didn't involve any direct contact with Lee Oswald and could not be used to make a case against him it simply was not in line with the Hoover directive on focusing on and making a case against Oswald.

Hi Bill, I'm looking forward to Dallas too and surely we should be able to connect, not like there will be crowds or anything...grin. As to some further background, we know he was in Miami on Nov. 11 which is when the Parrot Jungle incident occurred, the report says he was working as a bellhop at the Fountainbleau - McClaney had gotten him the job - he had worked for McClaney in Havana. It also says he was a recent exile and was living at the McClaney estate on Pine Tree Drive in Miami. Now depending on what recent means I suppose he could have been in La. that summer but it sounds more like he had emigrated directly into the U.S. via Miami and had not been floating around all that long.

Bill, the first part is correct, he had worked in the Havana casino's and had been helped enter the company by McClaney . At the time of the incident he was reported staying in one of McClaney's Miami properties, that is in the reports. I have never seen anything that linked him to the abortive air attack that was going to be made with the cache of explosives from the trailer at McClaney's brothers outside New Orleans though. If you have SWHT you will find some further detail on him but he appears to have been more a Casino worker who would have been hanging and gossiping with some of the more activist exiles McClaney was paying to put together some raids...all of which aborted or got busted via informant feeds to the FBI, the McClaney exile crowd seems to have been especially loose lipped. Anything putting the fellow in Louisiana would be interesting and certainly new to me...

Sorry David, somebody already beat you to that scenario. I have seen a letter and very large map sent to the WC in which the scenario was that LBJ actually did jump out of his car on Houston, and machine gun JFK on Elm. And the rest of the motorcade turned left on Houston and went out that way... It was extremely detailed, showing Johnson's actual path and the other shooters etc. I think Anna Marie had recovered a copy of it all from the Archives... I've been holding my breath that it would not show up as a 50th anniversary book... so far its pretty much the only thing that hasn't.

David, try The Art of Intelligence by Henry Compton, he was CIA liaison to the FBI on counter terrorism and his observations on that are pretty stark. Its only part of the book though so you might go the library route.