Larry Hancock

I honestly think it would be wrong of me to try and overview given the detail work John did - and the devil is in the details.  Gary Murr might jump in and give it a shot as he is more recently familiar with it).

Major takeaways - both the forensics consultant and the coroner were aware that the crime scene was been managed in a way to locate people and locations to support a Sirhan shooting scenario with fewer shots than there really were.  Evidence of holes in the ceiling and pantry doors was first ignored, then some positions were changed and then the materials themselves were destroyed.

So, way to many shots for just Sirhan.   Everybody talks about that, John demonstrates it from the crime scene itself.

Then John went into great detail on the autopsy and found paths what were not in the official report as well as strong reason to challenge the caliber of the gun used for the close range shot.  

He also had first hand access to ballistics materials and worked with Sirhan's attorneys aide Rose Lynn Magnan on it to show how the evidence was illegally handled and archived...he details that at length. 

But the real point is that he totally reconstructed (as a professional model maker) the crime scene, redid all the measurements and positioning related to the photos...and supported his findings with that level of detail.  He did not go into conspiracy, what he did was go into the police investigation and the evidence presented in the trial - and how it was presented.  You need that for context.

Also, if  you assess that Sirhan was totally unaware of what was happening in the pantry that evening,  you really need to read the police transcript of his interviews and see how sharp he was at that point in time and how he was trying to play the officers. I summarize some of that in one of the early chapters in my RFK study at: 

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Incomplete_Justice_-_At_the_Ambassador_Hotel.html

I offer all this is the spirit of providing information, not lobbying for it at all.

And for those who want to explore the subject with a comprehensive knowledge of both the crime scene and the related forensics, ballistics and autopsy work I suggest John Hunt's clinical study of the actual evidence:

https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Plain-Site-Search-Murder-ebook/dp/B0BR5WWY3Y

If you have not read it then you simply don't have all the facts...or at least I don't see how that would be possible and I've studied the LAPD materials extensively myself.....but that was nothing in comparison to what John did.

Martin Nee said it quite well,  to my recollection as a long time member the forum is supposed to be about exploration and education - not advocacy and not evangelism. I sincerely hope to see it return to that mode of operation and moderation.

You have a very good point Allen and I've personally not done any work that at all going past his involvement with the restructuring of Domestic Ops beginning in 63 which David Boylan has written about.  Given his egregious failures he mush have had one or more senior level champions at CIA and I would not be surprised to find it linked to Angleton and MH/CHAOS. 

Who was he doing liaison for in terms of the Black Panthers - given his disasterous liaison work on the Cuba Project I would not have expected that to work out well - which clearly it did not.

If somebody carries that on one of the most important questions would be who remained his champion inside the CIA for the rest of his career and who were his 'angels' in public circles?

Ron, I think you will enjoy In Denial, its about covert operations in general although it delves most deeply into the Cuba Project of a prime example of why the cover operations model fails - but then is continually resurrected.  You will probably find it amusing that Dulles went on record that the CIA should be removed totally from covert military operations but that actually was a result of the inquiry after the BOP and of course JFK did agree and began doing that first in Vietnam and then was well on the way to taking it from the CIA in the Americas - particular in regard to Cuba - and giving it to the Joint Chiefs (and CINCATLANTIC) totally by the summer of 63.

On connections, I can say with certainty that Angleton and Harvey were still talking and close to each other before Harvey went off shore to Italy - Angleton did not really talk to many and for a few months Harvey had time on his hands. But of you want some equally interesting connections you might try Hecksher....SE Asia in Laos, then special assignment in the Golden Triangle, then back to the Cuba Project, into Mexico City on an assignment we totally do not understand but which may have involved Cubela (same time as Nagle talks about the mystery CIA guy who came and went), then back to the Cuba Project and on to AMWORLD which begins recruiting people like Carlos Hernandez and Felix Rodriquez.

  -- connections everywhere, the trick is the final connection to Dallas..

Ron, about all I can do is suggest suggest you read In Denial if you want a full understanding of the Cuba Project, the Bay of Pigs and Barnes role in both - in that project he was put in a very unique role, and in a strange situation that crossed a presidential transition.  That made oversight extremely complex as did what was a virtually unique organizational structure for the whole thing - which along with Barnes was the subject of the entire project along with Barnes.  The IG report was also quite an indictment of both King and Dulles for that matter - which I suspect is why Barnes was allowed to write his own rebuttal to it, a very unusual practice in itself. Unfortunately Barnes had the reach and support to market his version to the media, which was one of the reasons JFK ended up being so roundly blamed for failures that had been occuring months before he ever took office.

Barnes was the guy for Cuba,  Dulles had left him virtually alone, J.C. King had no real clue as to what was going on operationally...that all becomes very clear in their testimony at the follow up hearings.  Barnes was the one meeting with JFK, isolating him from the people actually in the operation, Barnes was the one talking directly to Commander in Chief Atlantic. Barnes was the one running the highly secret Castro poison plot.

So yes in regard to Cuba Barnes was supremely important and the entire IG report on the failure focused on Barnes - which is why he was allowed to write his own rebuttal. 

As to the timing, the whole Cuba project Phase 1 was supposed to succeed before the election and both Nixon and Eisenhower were appalled when they found it it had totally failed on both concept and timeline.

Oh  yes, David has developed quite a career history on him, much of that is Tipping Point but I'm sure he can do a synopsis here. Emileo had an exemplary career and was highly regarded in the Agency.  He was also achieved a rather unique status as a political action agent and while with SAS at JMWAVE did a good bit of traveling.  His address book is a who's who of familiar CIA names...

I will alert David to this post and I'm sure he will follow up here.

Thanks Ron, certainly I'm up for another show with Jim.  Two things, first on Barnes, there is no doubt that he was capable of independent action and although its speculation, he may have actually proceeded with is own very compartmentalized false flag operation after Eisenhower was out of office. There are suggestions that he had a plan in place to stage an attack on Guantanamo - that plan aborted due to a disastrous accident with the explosives that had been smuggled though Guantanamo. That would have involved a separate Navy task group deployed off Cuba without JFK's knowledge.  Just traces of such a plan but I do discuss them in In Denial.

On the Rodriquez's,  Ernesto Sr and Jr in New Orleans, Jr connected to Oswald, both with a history at Camp Street and Bannister and brother Emilio in a senior CI and propaganda position with SAS at JMWAVE.  Felix from a different family with his own backstory to a planned sniper attack on Castro (Pathfinder).

Thanks - and of course different takes are fine, this time I (and David) just happen to be the one(s) bringing them to the party.

David, and everyone else actually, what I have learned over the years and continue to learn is that I can't really tackle all the questions and views that have developed over sixty plus hears in 'sound byte' type posts...nor in interviews for that matter.  Discussing any topic which has evolved though decades and eras of information and writing - with some things highly mysterious and suspect at first but explained and demystified with more information - just gets any particular remark I would make entangled by what has gone before.

And in this instance, where the historical record regarding Oswald and the assassination has been intentionally obfuscated and in some cases filled with outright lies, its even worse.  Including the fact that in many cases positions have been taken on what people wrote or presumed about Oswald, not what he said and equally importantly wrote for himself.

We have learned a huge amount about CIA operations and practices since I started writing around 2000, some of the most key information only surfacing in the last five to eight  years. The same can be said about the operations of FBI field offices - much of which Stu and I learned in a different venue, working on the MLK assassination.  My view now is that context, continuity and consistency in regard to Oswald himself are critical to evaluating what Oswald did from his school years on.

Beyond that his activities beyond New Orleans were seriously affected by people he came in contact with there, people who misrepresented themselves and played to his personal goals (and ego). We have only really come to understand who those people were in the last five years or so.

In short, its a view of Oswald that developed for me only in the past two to three years once I decided to commit to focusing entirely on him, not Dealey Plaza, not the shooting scenario, not the cover up etc.  Just on Oswald.  It may be wrong, it may be right or just partially right.  But its a deep enough story to require a book and the book will without doubt be contrarian. 

Well not totally contrarian, Oswald did not kill JFK, he was manipulated, and the most shocking part might that it was done in a manner that if he had lived and told everything he knew it might have made no difference in the end.  Of course that is how 'true deniability works'. 

Reasonable questions Ben, and ones that have been around for decades now. They were there when I started researching and writing and formed many of my earliest thoughts about Oswald - several of which have evolved and changed with time and with more information. What they are now - and why - will be explored in a forthcoming book by David Boylan and myself, The Oswald Puzzle.  As it turned out nothing short of a book was sufficient to deal with those and many other questions about Oswald.

And given the work that is still going into that book I'll be reserving further comments until it is available.

Ron, I think the argument - and the mystery - will always be how much of their behavior was intentional versus pure incompetence (magnified by hubris and career chasing by  Barnes).  Basically Barnes and Bissell had been hugely successful in the Guatemala project, so much so that Dulles gave them their head on Cuba and Barnes proceeded to set up and run the Cuba Project in a totally different manner than Guatemala or even the earlier failed effort in Indonesia. He totally changed all the operations practices the CIA had used and then when his new structure failed to produce results by the target date in October,  moved from a low profile infiltration project to a D Day, hail Mary, full scale invasion - at the relatively last minute - with no experience and no resources for any such thing inside the CIA.  That is why both the CIA IG report and separately the CIA historian effectively laid the blame internally on the Agency and specifically on his methods.

I'm really not trying to pitch In Denial but in this instance the matter is so complex that a few sound bytes cannot describe something that happened not over three days on the beaches but an entire year.   And of course the other factors that have to get some attention  were the "wild cards" that Barnes put into play that totally failed - but which he of course could never talk about - the Castro assassination efforts only being part of that story. None of the wild cards being things that were ever conveyed to or discussed with JFK.

What is not in doubt and is in the records is that in the weeks before the landings, the Joint Chiefs pointed out that even successful landings would be unsustainable without a major Cuba uprising occurring at the same time - that was discussed in several of the planning meetings and Barnes and company chose not bring up the point that Castro had crushed the changes of that by rolling up all the opposition groups some two/three months prior to the landings. In fact, nothing about the landings was coordinated or supported by any the counter revolutionary groups the CIA had been trying to support over the preceding  year - Barnes chose to keep them out of the equation, supposedly based on security concerns. 

What is also not in doubt is the Joint Chiefs had pointed out that the landing would be in grave jeopardy if any Cuban military aircraft were operating over the beached - and Barnes was well aware of the fact that the latest estimates the day before the landings were launched showed that the pre-landing air strikes had been far less successful than previously thought - with much of the Cuban Air Force sill very much alive and operational.  Yet he and Cabell failed to raise that as a critical issue the night they chose not to argue the issue of more air strikes with JFK - who very likely would have aborted the landings at that point.

Dulles was so disassociated from the entire Cuba project much less the landings its hard to tell what he knew - he had left the whole thing under the direct supervision of Barnes working under WestHem Director J.C. King...whose testimony after the fact showed his almost total lack of any detailed knowledge as well. The IG report states it was virtually unique in CIA history at that point because of its strange organizational structure - which allowed the Air Operations to be run completely independently than the ground operations or the sea operations for that matter.  At the Bay of Pigs Air, Ground and Sea ops did not even use the same radio frequencies and their were not forward air controllers on the beach set up to direct Brigade or Navy air strikes in real time. 

Yes, Barnes and Bissell and King were responsible; I can't really get across in limited forum posts how much so.  The IG report captured a good deal of it but even the IG and the CIA historians work doesn't tell the full story because they did now know how consistently Barnes had lied to Hawkins and Esterline. Why can be debated forever but clearly Barnes and had an ego and degree of hubris - and afterwards went into a state of obsessive denial, personally acting to place the blame on JFK.

Ron, In Denial does make it clear that Barnes and Bissell, regardless of motive, lied to both JFK - and to Hawkins and Esterline at the same time.  Unfortunately Hawkins and Easterline believed him before hand and afterwards and repeated Barnes' lies to the field officers at JMWAVE...who repeated it to the Cubans.   It was only decades later when they were shown actual documents and transcripts that they Hawkins and Easterline realized the truth...way to late at that point.

In Denial makes it clear how far JFK actually went to resend certain of his rules during the three days of the on the beach and authorize more American involvement; it also makes clear which of his directives were never complied with at all - including his order that it operation had to happen entirely at night with all ships out in international waters by  daybreak and that the Brigade and Navy be fully prepared for an immediate evacuation if the landing was opposed.

The story  is actually much more tragic when you realize who should actually bear the blame for the disaster.

Tom, what I will say about Marina, as I have about other figures such as Nagell, is that as a source she had to be approached with a situational and chronological study of her remarks - which changed over time, and depending on who was questioning her under what circumstances (and for that mater her own legal exposure, which was quite serious).  I will be discussing that in an upcoming book which offers a broad and relatively contrarian view of Oswald, innocent and as a patsy-  but also as someone who was a lot more than the cardboard cutout we have often made him .  

He had his own character, his own agendas and his worldview - we (and I) have written too much about him without fully considering that he was not at all one dimensional.  The rest on that, and an exploration of Marina and others as sources, I'll leave to the book.

The Milteer threat was reported to both the FBI...who did investigate the individuals named in the tape recording... and it was reported to the Secret Service. Because Washington DC had been mentioned in the conversation, the Secret Service logged it in their PRS file for Washington.  And because of their practices at the time, they reportedly only pulled threats logged for the city/cities visited on a particular trip for special attention - which means it was not pulled at all as a threat related to the Texas trip. 

And even though they did have a credible threat report related to the same ultra right group (the NSRP/to which the individuals mentioned by Milteer were related) for San Antonio, they responded to that there, but did not specifically translate it to Dallas either.

That sounds incredibly incompetent, but it appears that their practices of the time did not consider mobile threats.  On the other hand since the related SS travel files for that period appear to have been destroyed, we can't be totally sure of that.

That's true Jamey, rather than the HSCA, when Stu and I started our years of work on the MLK case we began with the FBI files, which are extensive and which gave us a very positive roadmap of where to look for the real conspiracy in King's murder - in several instances the Bureau had started off on strong leads and even begun to pursue them.  Unfortunately Hoover's directive to focus strictly on Ray, the Memphis DA's decision to use evidence in hand simply to go after Ray (not unlike in the Sirhan case - DA's love having simple cases) meant that the Bureau's work did not go where it might, could have - but it rather than any HSCA material was our starting point.

Jamey, as I  understand it the limited number of HSCA records relating to their limited MLK work are still sequestered by Congress itself, basically Congress (and I think a single Congress person) has to formally request the Clerk of the House to release them in some format and that was never done.  Stu Wexler has taken the lead in an effort to not only get them released but to work with Congress and he and his high school class actually got a cold case act through Congress to set up a Committee to release related files to a whole series of civil rights era murders from that period. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Cold_Case_Records_Review_Board

Stu would be the person to contact about the MLK files....he does post here occasionally and  you could also message him.

Greg, that would have been early days when the MFF initially established and was operating under Ollie Curme; he would be the person to contact about the history of any such financial arrangements.  I think he posts here on occasion or  you might attempt to message him with your question.

Gayle Nix Jackson's book has a lot of detail on the FBI investigation including all the photos including the railroad and path area as well as diagrams and sketches of the route. Its an excellent resource on the Walker shooting.

Gerry, Walker was avowedly and aggressively anti-Communist and anti-Castro, he was frequently quoted in speeches and media on those positions and he had even gone to Miami very openly in the summer of 1963, and spoken in support of the exiles and against the Kennedy Administration on that topic. In response several exile activists as well as a number of their private supporters - Hemming, Sturgis, Hall, Vidal etc had begun to solicit him for money.  Hemming would routinely complain about people going to Dallas and trying to cut in on Walker as a funding source - problem is Walker had no real money and was never known to have given anything to their cause.  What little he had was going into his own political campaign.

In regard to the "training camps" near New Orleans, there is extensive information available on both the MDC camp and the Mclaney dynamite stash and Walker has nothing to do with either.  David and I have written about both those in a number of places so I'll leave the details to that.

Excellent point Gerry - I said kicking myself - why the heck have none of us thought of that before.  Bolt action rifle, fire and "bolt" especially if somebody is heard running in your direction but safest thing to do anyway.  So no shell hull to be recovered...

  -- Well done...

Well the answer should be in the camera footage of Fritz holding the shells in his hand - which Alyea was positive about filming.  Its either one or three so that footage should be the tie breaker and at least answer one question.  I did think it a bit strange that Fritz was able to get behind the boxes and pick out either one or three and Alyea could not get at least one from that angle...on the other hand he may only have been wanting a close up of the shell so that might explain Alyea just getting one for him to film - although Alyea certainly didn't put it in those words.

  -- and I didn't think to ask at him either....too bad we didn't have all the right questions back then...

Pat, the story Alyea told me was that he was in the area of the boxes and Fritz told him the cartridges were there on the floor by the window but the stacking of the boxes prevented Alyea from taking footage.....he complained and said that Fritz picked up all the cartridges, held them so that he could film them and then tossed them back down.  He may have changed those remarks at times but I'm pretty sure that is also what he had in his three newsletters...which he happily sold me copies of when we talked.