Larry Hancock

David, I'm doing this from memory so it will be imperfect - Nagell was recruited by some unknown party to go to Mexico City for some activity related to Cuba during the general time frame of the missile crisis....the only thing we know for sure that he did was to approach the embassy and express his intent to defect, providing information to a foreign government. That was documented, there was no response from the US intelligence community but it seems likely that it was some sort of test of our personnel and a dangle to the Cubans or Russians. Nagell was also contacted in Mexico City by someone who he had known in Tokyo, in the intel community, named Bob. I suspect that was Hecksher. Whether Hecksher was involved in the Embassy project or some related CI activity for Nagell is unclear, Nagell suggests the latter...possibly follow on work to his embassy dangle. While in MC he was contacted by someone who he said he had known in Tokyo, someone who knew that Nagell had mixed emotions about many of the things the US did in its counter intelligence work and who knew the Nagell had some level of exposure to Oswald in Tokyo, apparently in regard to Oswald's interest in the Soviet embassy there. That person recruited Nagell to investigate a risk that Oswald was felt to represent. I have never been clear that Bob/Hecksher was actually the individual that put Nagell on to Oswald, perhaps but I deem it unlikely given Hecksher's role at the time. Nagell may have confabulated this, he was rather upset with how the CIA had handled him. And for that matter Hecksher left Mexico City well before Nagell did. My guess is someone from Soviet intel followed up on Nagell's defection offer, responded to the dangle, got a file on him (the KGB was relentless with files) and realized that Nagell had been compromised in Tokyo and could be maneuvered into checking into Oswald (who I can see the KGB as being interested in since he seems to have been a mystery to them too). So personally I cannot directly connect Hecksher/Bob to Nagell's Oswald adventure.

Nagell traveled cheaply, in his own car and staying with relatives along the way...and checking into a veterans hospital in Florida as well. Nagell intimates that the Russians had provided some funding for him to investigate Oswald but it appears that as usual he took off on his own after Dallas and visiting his own relatives. Dick Russell might have more insight on where his money was coming from but that is an excellent question. Its also not impossible he might have had some money left over from whatever he was asked to do in Mexico City in the fall of 62. As for myself, I didn't run across anything that would tie down his finaces or spending - but it was clear that to some extent he was literally living out of his car during those travels.

The post I was referring to went up on my blog this morning David - the approximate time of his Mexico City visit and appearance at the Embassy would have been Fall 62 in the same general time frame as the Cuban missile crisis. He told Dick that he had been asked to do something related to Cuba and interestingly enough Hecksher was on a special assignment to Mexico City in that same time frame - for exactly what purpose is unknown.

Given that Nagell - and my views on his story - have come up here recently, I thought I would share a recent blog post I made on that subject. More importantly the post contains a link to an extended interview I did this month on Nagell with Bob Wilson. I was pleased with it and think it gave me the time to capture enough about my research on Nagell to present why I wrote about him in Someone Would Have Talked but why he does not appear in my most recent work, Tipping Point. If you are interested you can find the blog post and a link to the interview here: https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2022/02/01/richard-case-nagell-revisited/

On another subject, I have checked with Malcolm Blunt and he has no recollection of seeing any photo of Oswald in Florida...

In response to Jim's remark, I will be posting a more recent, extended discussion of Richard Case Nagell on my blog in the near future. The point I make in all my discussions about Nagell is that segments of his story about his time in Mexico City have been totally documented, and his description of his first contact in Tokyo with Oswald has been corroborated to some extent by showing that Hecksher was there as COS at the time (and also in Mexico City, likely being the BOB in Nagell's story) there are limits to what Nagell could have known about the attack in Dallas. What he could have known about Oswald as of August, and what is corroborated by Oswald's own letters to SWP and CPUSA, was that Oswald was being maneuvered into some action on the East Coast, in the DC area. He was also being maneuvered into appearing increasingly radicalized - per his request for advice to CPUSA (a group which he had skewered as being a tool of Soviet imperialism in his own manuscript little more than six to eight months earlier). And Nagell could also have warned them that the Cubans who were in contact with him were not Castro sympathizers but anti-Castro activists from Miami, where Nagell had just been. However following his arrest and with Nagell in jail, while he would have had information on his warning against an action against JFK on the East Coast and information about who was manipulating Oswald, there was literally no way for him to have gotten details on the attack in Dallas and the specifics of the Dallas conspiracy. Certainly there was more than enough reason to try to silence Nagell in terms of what he did know about Oswald and about his being used by anti-Castro Cubans. No doubt about that; what is could have known about any plan for Dallas, which only jelled in October, is questionable. All of which is why Nagell appears in SWHT but not in Tipping Point, given that the latter is totally focused on the Dallas attack.

If Christensen had any known or suspected history of talking about his intercepts he would definitely been a potential security concern, those in his career field were much like air crews in SAC, if not worse - virtually any concern about your reliability would get your supervisor's attention, potentially get into your personnel file and at minimum get you moved into another career area. That would be especially true for personnel tasked with highly sensitive criminal, economic and political watch lists - which would come from CIA, FBI, DEA etc. This sort of thing is no game, a handful of intercept operators did actually defect to the Soviets during the Cold War and created serious political and diplomatic flaps.

Ron, in regard to your question, the personnel assigned to those posts and duties were Air Force actually supporting NSA collections. Communications is one field in which extremely low ranking personnel are required to get relatively high classifications just to do their regular job - based on what they might see or hear in their work. These intercept personnel would be required to have TS at a minimum and are strict orders not to discuss anything about what they are monitoring much less what they hear. In fact all aspects of what frequencies, circuits and tasking lists are NSA level classified - and Kirknewton has special, non-military tasking which I discuss in SWHT. By that I mean commercial circuits where there might well be talk of drugs, major commercial shipments - not military but economic and political. And they have special names of individuals and topics that are on their watch list - that is what they report on, and nothing else. The HSCA investigation Scott reports on highlights just how seriously all that is taken. Christensen's chain of command would have faced a real problem in even how to report something (that would not go to NSA, the threat would have to go though Air Force HQ to DOD and on to Secret Service I suspect if not to the White House itself) that was not tasked - and clearly would have needed something solid to start though the authorizations. I trace though that logic in my writing on the incident in SWHT and speculate as to where talk of a threat to JFK would have come up. I tend to concur with David's last paragraph and to me Christensen seems to be trying to play the system without thinking about how much he was exposing himself with that letter - even relating that he had discussed details of an intercept with anyone other than the superior in charge of his activities and reports. A major, chargeable security violation right there - not that is not done, but putting it on paper is not smart at all.

No I don't and honestly in looking at his correspondence my impression was that he was literally trying to leverage the incident to bump his government payments...but then again I'm possibly overly harsh and that may have been a carryover from our discussion in which he certainly sounded like a smarta.... My take is that he heard a bit of the gossip about people going after JFK that was floating around the Miami to New Orleans circuits, in the drug trade, from the godfathers and for that matter in some of the Cuban exile groups. I explore that in an appendix in SWHT. As far as I know the most recent research has been the HSCA document related work that Scott did...

Mark Bridger is one of the DPUK folks who researched and wrote on Kirknewton, you can find his article here: https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Featured_Dealey_Plaza_Echo_-_Volume_11_Issue_3.html https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=141150#relPageId=26

Gosh Jim, you mean you missed my lengthy study of the Kirknewton incident in SWHT, I'm disappointed. I mean I even talked to David Christensen myself back then - a brief conversation perhaps but he was working as a greeter at Walmart at the time, said he was very busy and was not interested in a lengthy interview. He also claimed to have had one or more brain operations over the years, which had pretty well wiped most of his memories. Strangely his wife had not mentioned that during our first call, I had the sense he just might have been putting me off a bit...grin. A couple of very excellent research articles were written by DPUK members following my exploration of the incident and and have appeared in their Journal over the years. I also communicated with Scott prior to his presentation on his paper at last fall's JFK Lancer Conference; the new documents he had found relating to its original investigation were quite interesting. In SWHT I offer my own speculation as to who was making the call, and to whom...you will find that in the appendices. If anyone is interested I can be a bit more specific.

Greg, I know nothing other than what I would consider the gossip mentioned in the report - including the fact that nobody who worked with Fritz, including a couple of folks I have interviewed plus a host of DPD officers interview by Ian Griggs and others, ever mentioned anything about secret recording equipment. And in 1963 tape recorders were not exactly pocket affairs and also would have required one or more special wired mikes to pick up anything useful a room away. Certainly Gary Mack has sources, including other Dallas researchers, in the position to pursue the gossip and he's never said anything further on what would seem pretty explosive as far as I know? I don't doubt that Fritz may have known more than he ever commented on officially - we do have a HSCA note with a DPD officer who was close to him implying that (but its only a hand written note in the marginalia) and introducing Martino's name. And for that matter who would have operated the recorder during the interview and why would not Fritz immediately have protected himself by handing the tape over to the FBI or Secret Service - holding something like that to himself is the most dangerous thing he could have done. I've have to see something solid more on this to take it seriously...

Oh I definitely think Phillips was involved with a longer term propaganda operation using Oswald, that would have been a joint operation with SAS staff at WAVE and possibly involving DRE as well who had begun running an active propaganda effort during September. Phillips would have brought in INCA as well. Beyond that I see Phillips as actively supporting a SAS counter intelligence effort against the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. Both of those explain why in not only went to DC in October but went on down for meetings at WAVE in Miami. What I am unclear about is whether he was directly involved in assassination conspiracy, peripherally involved or just went along with the event and tried to use his resources to point Oswald to Castro and take advantage of the situation. Clearly I see him as a key figure given that I gave him a chapter in SWHT, its just a matter of of degree - given that he chose to actually point towards Morales in one of his books (which Morales took great exception to) its even harder to make the call. Especially since at the end Phillips out and out said the assassination involved members of the intelligence community.

Gosh Ben, questions that have been outstanding for decades - all at once, would you settle for answers for one or two to start...grin. I'd love to give them to you all in one fell swoop and would if I had them. I have described how Oswald was a poison pill for the agencies themselves and why plotters at WAVE would have known that - simply associating him with the crime, bringing him in as a suspect or accessory to be investigated would have panicked both FBI and CIA and hamstrung their investigations at some level. As a matter of fact we know it did in regard to both agencies as the FBI destroyed and altered evidence and WAVE actually made an investigation of possible Cuban exile involvement and then ditched the findings. In regard to Oswald being a patsy, let's not even go that far and assume he had to been seen as the shooter, lets say all that would be necessary would be to tie him to the attack, not as a shooter (that's the lone nut after the fact damage control thing) but as a suspect, an accessory - actually planting a rifle on the sixth floor linked to him and doing something to draw attention to shot/s from that building would do the trick wherever Oswald had been. Frazier was brought in as a suspect, questioned and threatened with charges for less than that. So was another TSBD employee, an accountant no less, with even the most minimal reason to have been considered a suspect. And once Oswald was even a suspect - with his image from New Orleans, his time in Russia - where would the press have chased that story. I can tell you, I put one very early newspaper headline on the cover of Tipping Point. And any investigation of Oswald as an accessory would have triggered a search for associates and led back down a trail of his links to mysterious Cubans in New Orleans suspected as being Castro agents (just where Garrison started a few years later)....there were leads planted to feed that story line and many of them were put into play over the next 72 hours - however Hoover's orders and the overall high level government containment operation totally overwhelmed them. Of course Oswald might have looked even more suspicious, what if the media had a story the he and others had been making arrangements to fly out of the country...that would help, but instead of the media that report was made to the FBI and the FBI kindly backdated it from days before to months before to write it off with no further investigation. Beyond that we are all faced with the fact that wrestle with all the details of what happened as if they were actually the plan - we have no way of knowing that and we even have the remark from Martino that the whole plan fell apart when whatever was supposed to happen with Oswald came apart at the seems with his arrest. Now having said that, I don't expect it even comes close to answering your questions but I also don't think they can be answered simply in the context of November 22, which that is what David and I are working on now. Perhaps we can come up with a scenario that does explain at least part of what seems anomalous that day - realizing we have no idea exactly what was supposed to happen other than the shooting attack on the President. We do have to consider that there may well have been one plan as understood by the tactical team in Dallas and quite another in the minds of those above them. As Wheaton claims to have heard,they had their own motives and plans. I continue to ponder it all and spend some time working on a more detailed scenario, but I do that to satisfy myself, not with the idea it can ever be proved.

As David says, we laid out a fairly simple scenario involving DRE connections in New Orleans to both case officers and SAS officers at JMWAVE - officers with projects in play which could have used Oswald in both propaganda and counter intelligence, both of which would have involved Mexico City (and very likely David Phillips). As David also said, it certainly could be more complexity in getting Oswald from NO to the Mexican border and back to Dallas ...we are wrestling with that, well David is, I'm just trying to keep up.

All I can offer is my very detailed exploration of events not only at Bethesda but over the first 72 hours that is in SWHT 2010 - I would challenge anyone to read that and then characterize what happened as part of a tightly controlled plan. The fact that three autopsy reports had to be prepared, all of which were in conflict with the first recorded remarks by FBI agents observing the autopsy pretty strongly speaks to the lack of a prepared plan. As to Burkley, actually he does provide some sign that a containment effort was at least attempted, simply by his trying to prevent a full autopsy, telling the officers in command at Bethesda that the assassin was in custody and they only needed to retrieve the bullets as evidence. His effort was rejected and an autopsy ordered, and RFK signed off on a full autopsy protocol. If anything Burkleys involvement and his apparent retention of some autopsy materials offers one of the few immediate indications that we have - the actions of SecDef McNamara to constrain any military response represent another. However RFK shows no obvious effort to insert himself into a containment program that afternoon before his arrival at Bethesda. Actually Burkley, as with many others, asked to put forth his information to the HSCA and when he received on immediate response and he watched the whole thing morph from what had started to be an aggressive criminal investigation I suspect he decided nobody really wanted to hear what he had to say - he certainly was not the first witness to do so. The only other thing I would say is its important to separate the first 72 hours which was pure chaos and some containment from the following weeks when the story of a lone nut was put into place and all evidence to the contrary either removed or simply managed so as not to become an issue for the media to generate conspiracy headlines.

To Bill's question, in 1962 there was an abortive effort to set up a training camp in Louisiana, Sturgis and David Ferrie and others were involved but that plan fell apart after the missile crisis and with the administration crackdown on exile missions. In the summer of 1963 there was a minor effort to take some volunteers to a place outside New Orleans and give them some minimal training before shipping them out to Central America...that camp collapsed following an FBI raid on a McClaney farm in the same area where explosives and other materials were being collected for a very separate bombing mission against Cuba. The two 1963 activities are often confabulated into one "camp" but the details on all three "camps" are in my books. While in jail in New Orleans Oswald did request to meed with a specific, subversive activities division FBI officer but instead a regular staff person was sent to meet with him. As to Chicago, way to long to go into here but the "Lee" aspect was investigated and found to have no validity by the HSCA....one man, Vallee, was reported as a threat by someone he made hostile remarks to about JFK while eating breakfast at a bowling alley diner; the second threat was apparently routed to the Secret Service by the FBI in regard to people they felt might be hostile to JFK and who were traveling to Chicago. People were picked up and questioned but beyond that they were not arrested, no weapons were seized and they were released within 24 hours.

Having been through the entire process myself, both a military draftee and a volunteer, my opinion is that a totally no-draft military is not a good thing. Certainly you do need a core of long term, experienced specialists across many fields but when you get to the point of long term, overseas operations it is insane to keep rotating the same people back and forth overseas to those assignments. It destroys their families, their health - its even worse when you turn to using the National Guard for overseas assignments because your force cannot sustain your commitment. If you want to go to war overseas you need to justify it, call for new volunteers and start a draft. Otherwise, don't do it. The draft proved to be pivotal in raising the level of pain required to get us out of SE Asia. More recently we have left a great deal of that pain to be literally absorbed by a relatively small number of volunteers - and deployed them over and over again into an even more endless combat overseas. If more people had share the pain and loss it might have come to a close earlier. I know many won't relate to that SE Asia era personally so to add a bit of reality take a listen to this - which Armed Force Radio would not play overseas so I never heard it at the time: Personally I would vote for some sort of minimal national public service as a requirement, with lots of options including first responders, medical services, and many other assignment options including public works as options to the combat military.

Or I could just buy one on EBay...but if I get the time I want to do some searching in my own materials. I would say that if anyone wanted to break some new ground in this taking a detailed look at state Department documents on Cuba for 1963 would be a suggestion, another would be to review the meetings of the InterAgency Coordination Commitee for Cuba - the group RFK was meeting with - or to take a looke at the ARRB's final report to see if they turned up anything on contingency plans dealing with attacks on Americans.

I would give the caution that what Wheaton heard were remarks from Jenkin's Cuban friends, who would have been talking broadly about what they had heard from insiders with some knowledge of the attack or plot. And we have to accept that Jenkins had no real context to filter or appraise those remarks. When Wheaton did take Jenkins and Quintero to the ARRB, all he suggested was that they be interviewed for what they might know or have heard, he offered the ARRB no details himself. As to the need for a patsy, I tried my best to lay that out in Tipping Point in terms of Oswald not being a patsy in the way he ended up in the Lone Nut scenario, but rather used as a type of poison pill because the plotters knew exactly how dangerous his name would be for both the CIA and the FBI in terms of their connections to him. To the Cuban exiles he may have represented a way to force a war against Cuba, to the guys above them he represented a way to block the agencies from a serious investigation which might have actually lead to them. Just as Wheaton did describe, there were two levels in play in the conspiracy and the guys on the ground in Dallas did not necessarily have the big picture the people above them did.

Well yeah, on that I have to fall back on the practice that if you get something that explosive you either need get an affidavit from the source or better yet get them to sign something you can put in an appendix or otherwise make available. Better yet it should have been in a taped interview, voice or video with a transcript. That is what Noel Twyman did and I did it with John Martino's son. And of course such key remarks should be exactly quoted in the book - unfortunately I no longer have a copy of Lamars book so I can't check out some of the things in this thread myself.

Actually WAVE was quite aware that DRE had begun a propaganda campaign against Oswald in August/September - including press releases and letters to Congress. I cover this in Tipping Point. There is a good possibility that campaign was being carried on with CIA support and that specific WAVE / SAS personnel would have been immediately aware of being exposed by DRE's actions. I imagine as soon as the name Oswald hit the media there was a panic at certain desks in Miami. I've tried to lay out the details and extent including exactly who would have been involved in these activities - including some brand new and key names.

Ron, I doubt anybody would have had to tell the DRE case officer or their superiors at WAVE that shutting up DRE or making them look less than credible with their Oswald story was a priority in order to conceal SAS and WAVE knowledge of and activities around Oswald.

As I noted above, the effort to create a contingency plan is documented and even covered in the media. As to RFK at Bethesda, I highly doubt Lamar would lie about it but he may well have built a scenario that outruns the facts that have emerged over following years - as in the case of his scenario involving AMWORLD and the idea of an imminent invasion of Cuba, both of which were proven wrong by further research.

Two other factors may have been in play: 1) the same stories that the DRE was circulating were also being put forth in Miami and to the FBI by locals like Sturgis and Buchanan but also by Martino who aggressively took the information to the FBI and also made sure that it was going back through channels to folks who were connected to people in a position to push it politically - like Pawley. The political contacts, which would have reached as far as the Luce media, went nowhere. The FBI contact got interest directly from Hoover who pushed the Miami office for details from Martino that could be investigated. In the end Martino could provide none and after fruitless attempts to name sources in Cuba or provide anything that would stand up the FBI pushed back and he dropped out. Basically the DRE and its fellow travelers didn't have anything that would stand up to the test - they got media attention, FBI attention via Martino but there was nothing to follow up that interest. 2) If the DRE had kept pushing its knowledge about Oswald and Cuban contacts someone might have begun to investigate just how much contact they had with Oswald, if it had continued beyond New Orleans and why they had not reported the things they claimed after the fact to either the FBI or the CIA. That could have gone really badly for all concerned.