Larry Hancock

If anything Oswald represented a great source of anti-Russian, anti-Communist propaganda. Having essentially chosen the Soviet Union and spent time there, his unpublished monograph contains harsh remarks about Russia essentially using ideology strictly for their nationalist purposes. It would have been great stuff...and Domestic Ops was fully aware of it. For some reason the decision was made to defer on that, taking advantage of Oswald's interests in Cuba and Castro's socialist revolution - apparently with the hope of using him against the FPCC - a new target for both the FBI and the CIA in 1962/63. The result in New Orleans was the production a major propaganda piece built around Oswald (including a record of his radio appearance), published by INCA, scheduled for wide scale distribution across Latin America and failing in that purpose only by being subsumed in the assassination. The fact that Kent himself had taken up office in New Orleans during that period suggests Oswald being a useful idiot against communism and Cuba and the FPCC...and the refusal to release CIA files related to Joinnedes and the DRE is another indication that CIA was using Oswald's connection with the DRE and subsequent events (very likely manipulated via DRE) as a propaganda tool. --- at least to me...

(edit: and that's why I find it makes sense that Hoover assists the CIA with their Mexico false story... or risk it being exposed that Oswald was an informant for the FBI) Totally agree with this David, in fact compliance was insured because full disclosure would have exposed the fact that the FBI was using him as a source and had him under subversive group monitoring - as well as the fact that the CIA was using him - in Alan Kent's (Joinnedes supervisor's) term as a "useful idiot". https://aarclibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/dan_hardway_aarc_9_26_14.pdf

If we are correct about Oswald not being in Mexico... it becomes even more likely that the Odio's see him when they said they did... meaning he traveled to Dallas on the 24th/25th of Sept and spent the week there. Given what was done to Odio's information... I wonder about your thoughts on how Mexico was indeed significant to the basic conspiracy. ..........My current thought is that Oswald was being "handled" by individuals that took him to Dallas, to McKewon's, possibly to Houston and possibly on through south Texas and on across the border at least into Mexico. As to going across the border, I'm still fascinated by the material turned over to the DPD which would have shown Oswald being connected to a variety of suspicious individuals including Ruby...material which multiple officers described before it was turned over to Alexander - who acknowledged it, admitted it was in his possession and stated he had determined not to introduce it in Ruby's trial - and apparently destroyed it. I do hold open to the fact that there was material prepared to associate Oswald with Cuban and Castro agents that never got used as planned based on the plan being aborted with his capture at the Texas Theater. As I've said before, we have a picture of what happened but no idea of the totality of all that might have been planned - as Martino privately stated to his friends. Laying out such thoughts in a structured manner and supporting them remains a work in progress.

Hosty did state that during his Lancer conference appearance, expanding on it a bit to clarify that it came from friends of his serving in the MC field office. I followed up on that point with him by email and eventually by phone and he confirmed his remarks to me. Interestingly enough he was quite adamant about that and other points which are at variance with the official FBI position. The one thing which I brought up to him and which he would never comment on or really acknowledge was the point of his telling a Secret Service agent that Oswald had been under observation meeting with subversives shortly before the assassination....I even provided him with documentation on that and he declined to comment.

In regard to Jim, to be clear, my choice is not to post new "work" here because I feel serious work requires a lot more context and discussion (and citations) than you get in a thread, which inevitably begins to wonder into other directions. I certainly do publish, with JFK and other subjects on my blog and with projects like the Wheaton names paper which has research (thanks to David Boylan and Bill Simpich) available nowhere else. We just need to get that up in its newest version, its at version 9 now. And I plan to make my thesis paper on the conspiracy available free of charge on the internet - when its done. Aside from that, my newest book will be available in March and among other things hopefully it will totally change the conversation about President Kennedy, the Cuba Project and the Bay of Pigs. David, I have no corrections to offer, although I don't consider what happened in Mexico City as totally resolved; I do consider the official story to be indefensible and less and less relevant. I also hold open the possibility that Oswald was taken to Mexico (not necessarily Mexico City) for another purpose...but that's another story entirely. What I would say it has now reached a point where I do not consider Mexico City as being significant to the attack in Dallas nor to the basic conspiracy. But that will step on lots of toes and drive everyone to defending their territories so that's another story for a later time.

I wish I had Paul, so far the only conclusion I have is that the official story of it does not wash at all. And that something about Mexico City raised grave concerns in regard to Oswald and impersonation - within the first 24 hours after the assassination. Otherwise there would be no need to have removed a record from the Johnson phone call log relating to his call to Hoover Friday evening and then take 14 min out of a tape from the following morning when Johnson calls Hoover specifically to raise the issue of new information regarding Mexico City - and in response Hoover brings up evidence of others being involved with or impersonating Oswald there - and then a section of the tape is removed. I haven't given up on constructing my own scenario for why Oswald might have at least been in Mexico, if not in the fashion of the official story, and that will show up in my final thesis about the overall conspiracy. But that's a ways down the road....

This is one reason why I often don't post here other than to offer information....simply because even introducing speculation or a new lead seems to force everyone into taking a position. If you read my blog entry I state that I remain totally open on the whole question of Mexico City and totally question the official story line, although I believe Oswald was in Mexico for some time at least. I've followed David on the official story and accept that there overwhelming holes all though it....Including the photo issue which we discussed in the show. I had even invited David to present on his studies at an earlier Lancer conference. Clearly there is reason to question that Oswald himself was in either embassy, and I will be blogging about more in that. Anyone interested in a focused discussion can follow or post on it there. JFK research used to be pretty open ended, it seems to have become more a matter of finding what fits a preferred scenario or even political worldview - and then defending that territory. I don't believe that's the best approach so I'll leave it at that.

Paul, Carmine describes the new information at different points in the session, primarily having to do with his research on the third secretary of the Soviet embassy in Mexico city. The overall conversation is really about the host of anomalies that go along with the official story of Oswald's visit to Mexico. I am discussing it on my blog so you might want to check that for reference. I should certainly point out that it is speculative, just one more attempt to make sense out of an official story and timeline that simply does not work, as has been pointed out on this forum many times - and why the fear in Washington that weekend (including the missing call and tape erasure related to Johnson/Hoover conversations which are so suggestive of information being suppressed) was all about a confrontation with Russia rather than Cuba. I won't pursue it here, but jump into the blog responses if you choose, some good point-counterpoint already. https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2020/01/11/wrestling-with-mexico-city/

One of the reasons the numbers were considerable is that RFK was really pushing the program - to a large extent as a way to deal with the influx of young and active military trainees had come back from Cuba in the prison release deal with Castro for the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Given the agreement with Russia as a result of the missile crisis the Kennedy administration was wrestling with its Cuba strategy, turning to more covert operations yet facing a larger and growing Cuban anti-Castro community in the US. As JMWAVE missions operations were slowing down trained paramilitary Cubans were being released, and during 1963 even the DRE was being told that its members should give up their independent activities and join the MRR and Artime. Even star JMWAVE operative Felix Rodriquez had been sent off to Fort Benning for Army training. As for Artime and his group, with the start of AMWORLD he and his recruiters were given access to the Cubans in Army training as well as other Cubans in training with the Air Force at Sheppard AFB in Texas. He was successful in recruiting a number of them, including Rodriquez. One of the consequences of all this was that a goodly number of very well trained Cuban exiles would go on to become active, sometimes in sanctioned projects and often in very independent actions, across Latin America, and even into SE Asia. Some of them would help fuel the exploding drug trafficking and in new areas of organized crime. As one of them was remarked after a bombing in Miami - the CIA and the United States trained us well, we have lots of skills.

I don't have the book in front of me, as I recall their was a last letter exchange not long before Harvey's death and I think Angleton also contacted his wife afterwards...and then of course their was a burglary but not all the papers got taken (certainly reminds one of Angleton's personal MO about collecting things after deaths). As for "secret", that was likely a paraphrase on my part - as I recall the letters they simply refer to something the two share that should not be discussed...something like that. I doubt he actually said anything quite that dramatic but the exchanges certainly suggested they had done something together that needed to remain private.

There are two areas of Angleton "overlap" that have not been much discussed, one involves Angleton and Harvey in assassinations - Harvey approached Angleton for advice on the ZRIFLE project targeting Castro. The two men met, Angleton introduced Harvey to his British intelligence contacts for advice and also offered to assist him within Cuba. He may have done more, we don't know. Harvey's own notes comment on asking Angleton for advice and most especially how to make it deniable. Angleton's involvement in Cuban affairs is also not discussed - by anyone but me I don't think. In 1961 he was asked to assess and organize Cuban intelligence, both in terms of CI and in setting up a new intel service....that took him into association with the work Morales had done, with the AMOTS and in the establishment of the new Cuban intelligence service based on the AMOTS that Morales had trained and was still running after the Bay of Pigs. How close Angleton was to Morales we don't know but he certainly was very much into his work and the AMOT group, at least during 1961. As to the wording, I will look at what I might quote in NEXUS but I may have to go back to Stockton's book and I'm not even sure where that is not - pretty much all my attention is focused on In Denial at present.

In one fell swoop Trump managed to totally undermine growing protests inside Iraq about Iranian influence and gut the populist movement against the hardliners in Iran....all with the targeted killing of one hardliner who will be immediately replaced. No reason to step up and acknowledge the large scale failure of targeting killings to date, its seems so simple and somehow satisfying. And makes great political theater. Sort of like torture to get intelligence. It almost never works but clearly some people find satisfying as well .

Greg, it is discussed and cited in NEXUS but the actual source is the excellent biography of William Harvey by Flawed Patriot by Bayard Stockton....based in documents and letters provided by Harvey's wife. Up to Stockton's work there had been a false narrative that the two men did not like each other and were either competitors or adversaries - Stockton's work totally put the lie to that. We now know that Angleton assisted Harvey with his Castro assassination efforts and beyond that they appeared to have had some shared secret which we can only guess at. I heartily recommend Flawed Patriot as required reading as it overturns a lot of the misconceptions about Harvey from the earliest years of JFK research.

I think that's close Ron, we have the travel and expense documentation showing Harvey went to Miami, ostensibly to close down ZRIFLE - which at that point in time meant the Castro assassination activities with Roselli. There is also a phone call that strongly suggests Roselli was there although as expected Harvey puts no true name in his report. And a boat was rented when plenty were available from JMWAVE...suggesting Harvey wanted some privacy and did do a boat trip of some sort, maybe just fishing and drinking. Given that Morales had been supporting the operations and that three people were involved in the get together its likely he was involved but we have no hard proof. What we do have though is an ongoing series of Harvey / Roselli meetings after that and as Harvey was going overseas - when Harvey had been ordered to avoid such meetings and repeatedly chose not to. Those were very personal meetings in DC including Roselli staying with Harvey. There was some sort of very strong personal bond there - just as later letters and correspondence would reveal between Harvey and Angleton, with them sharing some secret that could never be talked about (per an Angleton letter).

Thanks David, interestingly that is not at all the sort of thing Ayers described in his book...very interesting. I think that is one of the new crypts you all have turned up, which are certainly revealing a lot of things we never had a handle on before.

David, do we have a document specifically naming Ayers? I recall Shackley and Morales's names appearing but I did not remember Ayers?

Probably as much as much as the drinking buddy conversations between Harvey, Roselli and Morales that spring. On a factual note, the search continues for actual operational documents involving Morales and Robertson from August on and although as Chief of Operations you might expect Morales (Zamka) to be all over the place he is not that much in evidence. And after TILT Robertson seems to just fade away. We do know that no sabotage operations were approved and boat ops were few and far between, perhaps that explains it. But we also know that both Shackley and Morales were terribly frustrated and literally pissed off by the new SGA/Fitzgerald projects such as AMWORLD and AMTRUNK which they felt to be totally worthless. About the only thing new that shows up is an sudden and unprecedented interest by WAVE and the AMOTS, including AMOTS in Mexico City in the Cuban who was becoming JFK's new backchannel to setting up actual meetings with Castro.

What makes it particularly interesting is that Rip's workload was not only light, but that several of the most well trained Cuban exiles (trained under Jenkins and operational under he and later Robertson) were also at relatively loose ends though the fall of 1963. The early AMWORLD recruits were essentially taken off the books, given new identities and held for "black exfiltration" out of the US to Artime's new bases. That did not occur until December/January. It appears they stayed in Miami, may have taken some limited communications training but were essentially paid but on hold through the end of the year. A number of intensely trained paramilitary operators, eager for action and with access to black operating funds in special AMWORLD accounts at a Miami bank, available to buy weapons in the US and cover travel and expenses as needed. What could possibly go wrong....

Robertson was not involved in AMWORLD per se, he was still operationally involved in the infrequent and low key boat operations out of JMWAVE though 1963 and into 1964. Probably his biggest operation of 1963 was the summer TILT mission with Pawley. Although Morales did oversee some PM training for a couple of the senior AMWORLD people - Artime and Quintero - the lists of the activities in that training look more like organizational and logistics skills for covert ops, not the sort of tactical expertise which would be Robertson's strong suit. Its possible Morales might have done the training himself. David Boylan found the records on the content but it did not specify the trainer. However Robertson was involved with Cuban volunteers that were recruited for AMWORLD in 1964, at least the ones that were picked for the Angola rescue operations and CIA mission to Angola in 1963. In doing so he met up with some of the former Bay of Pigs air unit that had been taken into the Makasi air project in Angola as well. During the last half of 1963 Robertson appears to have had a great deal of free time on his hands.

Two related things are telling as to the validity of his basic story - his lawyer actually said that he had proof Nagell had been in Mexico City he would have offered a much different defense; he told that to Russell. Of course we not only have proof of that we have the documents that he went to the American embassy there and essentially told them he was defecting, and intended to provide intelligence to a foreign power (most likely Cub)....and that received no security response at all (should have been reported to the FBI with them all over him). Second, if you read one of the ruling from the federal judge that put him into prison after appeal, the judge essentially said that he could be released at any time he wanted to admit that his action was strictly a matter of robbery (that is a paraphrase but the wording is suggestive and very anomalous). Pretty much looks like an offer to free him if he agreed to shut up and stop talking about other things he knew.

My sense is that Nagell was indeed not in New Orleans more than a couple of weeks, likely just enough to locate Oswald and monitor him. That raises questions about the purported table and photos of Oswald's meeting with other parties. Photos are easy to understand but how did the tape get made? Did Nagell have the right equipment for a concealed recorder? Or did he somehow bug the meeting place? He does say he warned Oswald the people he was meeting with were not who Oswald thought they were....so how did Nagell know that, had he seen them in Florida, or did he observe them in New Orleans and know they were associated with anti-Castro Cubans and were not Castro agents (that seems most likely ). I'm not trying to minimize his story, its just that aside from knowing Oswald it seems a real challenge for Nagell to have picked up much detailed information in New Orleans given his short time there. And given that he himself said he was forced to flee, its seems the bad guys were monitoring him as well, knew he had contacted Oswald and suspected he had warned him. All of which suggests that Negell was inserting himself rather openly in both Miami and New Orleans without having the time to blend in.....suggesting he might have gotten a broad picture of how things were going - basically that Oswald was being set up for something, but probably not much detail beyond that.

And the formula everlasting war is so simple, first you insert yourself into a conflict overseas which is religious, nationalist and cultural - none of which have anything to do with you. Predictably, at least some of your armed force will be attacked as intruders. Then you respond. This allows your leadership to claim they need extra powers to protect our forces (not remove them of course, protect them) and that some sort of preemptive response is mandated. They you get attacked some more and its on... Works every time.

I've been posting this all weekend because it says it better than pretty much anything else:

David, as for myself I'm fully committed to my new book coming out in a couple of months and to my final thesis on the conspiracy; delving back into Nagell beyond the analysis that I did in the work on by CD is just not in the cards. Beyond that, my own take has come to be that Nagell provided very useful information on Oswald in Japan, as far as early visits to the Soviet Embassy there and his cooperation in certain activities (which would have been ONI driven); Nagell was only an observer. Very possibly one of many watching what was going on with efforts to collect information from American GI's. I've also come to believe that other than offering early information about Oswald being approached by unknown Cubans in New Orleans, with said Cubans manipulating him while he played along feeling he was a source on them, there is little to be gained about the actual attack in Dallas because he was off the grid at that point. His revelations about Oswald could have been sensational in 1964, now they are simply corroborative. On your questions, as to Alpha 66, anybody watching contemporary events or even reading magazines would have tossed up their name in regard to Cuba....and we have to be cautions because many individuals who had joined Alpha 66 were also DRE members or members of other groups at different points. On Ferrie and hypnosis I'd have to dig back into the remarks and timing of that to even have an opinion. I certainly don't think Nagell actually went to Cuba and met either Raul or Fidel; at best he had been given a rather minimal assignment to monitor Oswald by Soviet agents in Mexico City, something which he only did marginally once he got back into the United States. His travels and activities certainly don't reflect a total focus on Oswald in 1963. And his remarks suggest that his Soviet contact and his CIA contact - who I feel was Henry Hecksher - both dropped off from him by summer. Which makes since given Hecksher's new AMWORLD assignment (we do know he had been in MC when Nagell was though). I don't think Nagell could have known exactly what Oswald's role in Dallas was; he would have been guessing after the fact. He did however know that as of New Orleans he was being played as a patsy so I would guess he would have figured the same for Dallas? Beyond that, as with most sources and especially with Nagell who was highly situational; I would generally trust what he was writing or even telling his attorney or the court immediately after his arrest. After you get past 1964/65 I tend to take it all with a couple of pinches of salt. Dick may feel very differently. My attitude is based on the total volume of his correspondence.

Its really no mystery, Nagell was definitely referring to Alpha 66 in his remark...however there is no sign that he ever had any contact or real information about them other than what he may have picked up in Mexico City where they were active that fall. They had also been getting the most media attention in 1963 due to their raids into Cuba. As I said, Nagell provided a list of the Cubans he did monitor in Miami and they were almost entirely all right wing type individuals not groups per se....people like Masferrer and his ilk that were really pretty marginalized at that point but who had gotten lots of media attention in prior years. As to Angel and Leopoldo, Nagell was referring to at least one (possibly both) of them who was a Cuban exile who had been taken into the Army for infantry officer training under the program pushed by RFK...a number of those people were being recruited by Artime and Segundo Borges beginning in the summer of 1963, some of them left the program to go into AMWORLD. David Boylan and I have been writing about them in our Wheaton Names research. Some of them and some of their friends did circulate though both the New Orleans area and on into Dallas beginning in August through November. And some of their friends in the DRE were most definitely under FBI monitoring and were saying very bad things about JFK. And some of them also ended up in both Chicago, New Orleans and Dallas. The good news is that we know a lot more about some of these things than when Nagell's story first surfaced so it can be cross checked, something critical to any source. And with any source, what Nagell knew from first hand experience (some of which can be corroborated) has to be balanced) against his full remarks, some of which had to have been speculation.