Larry Hancock

I'd also think the officers and managers in charge would have been career risk aware enough to make sure nothing happened to him....just can't buy that he didn't get special attention.

Even I have to really question this,  with his profile and a previous injury incident (not fully explained) I can't belive he did not receive special attention regardless of standard practices - including no possessions he could use for suicide and full time live monitoring (if a camera "went out" somebody should have immediately known it)....he knew way too much about powerful people for this not to be investigated to the maximum.

As to the camera issue, just how long was it off....if somebody says half an hour or something like that then how did he know....

If you have something to support the assertion that Leslie Sharp is not her true name it would be important because that is the name she is using in personal contacts and the name which appears with the book...

Have you watched this Paul, its similar to what Ralph did at Lancer:

 I did a good bit of background research on Ralph's book for a couple of months after the conference, but its just notes for myself, nothing in any format I could share.  A great deal of it was contextual.  Areas of issues and concern have already been shared with Ralph. More recently I've been exploring some good historical research on the stay behind groups and covert  post war events in Europe for a new book I'm working on.....so I'm hopefully becoming more educated, but at the moment its in my head or my draft chapters.

Stu just visited Ganis quite recently and Ralph was kind enough to review a great deal of material not in his book....including some things he thought were there, but didn't make it through the edits. Basically both Stu and are both following the story, doing a sort of peer review, and educating ourselves to be ready for Hank's work.  There are points that intrigue me and a few thoughts we have even shared with Ralph and Alan, but at this point both Stu and are in processing mode....

I've not learned much more on it - but in a way it sounds a bit like ZRIFLE,  a crypt created for one purpose and then used as a sort of cover to hide something else. The ZRIFLE crypt crypt was created to use in recruiting Staff D burglary/strong arm contacts overseas and then became a place to hide the special action assassination project under Harvey.  It appears that QJWIN might have been used domestically as a crypt  involving contacts with drug smugglers ( which the CIA did do both domestically and internationally since they know useful people and things) and then extended internationally, possibly first for drug smuggler contacts in Europe and potentially for other things. It does appear to have been used on multiple occasions.

It also reminds me a bit of the famous FBI T-1, T-2 designations which each office got to use for their own purposes, so we have loads of T-1's (sometimes real people, sometimes postal inspectors and sometimes illegal wire taps or break ins)  Always better to have it look like a human source rather than fully disclose potentially illegal activities which might come up in prosecution and trial. .

Since the CIA itself handles crypt assignments its almost impossible to corroborate outside their records - and doubly so because apparently at times, especially under Angleton, CI senior officers had the authority to create their own crypts and keep them outside the general system....much as Angleton did with his own files.

I've tried to do a little checking and I am told by people who know her personally that her true name is Leslie Sharp.  Haven't learned any more than that....

I'm going to exit this thread because as Paul notes its really about something different but just on a point I have a personal friend, a young Air Force officer, who worked at the Pentagon...she was there that day, saw the aircraft parts and was herself covered by the vaporized aircraft fuel cloud created by the strike into the building.  But I'm certainly not going to argue that point either.

I've said all that I have to say ....well other than in Surprise Attack. ...its time to bow out here. 

Honestly I can't prove a negative but my own conclusions were drawn from a much broader look, going back to the literally to the individuals and agencies involved in counter terrorism in the late 1970's and tracing their behavior through the decades up to the 9/11 attack. There is absolutely no doubt that people were seriously, but largely ineffectually, trying to combat a certain type of terrorism, primarily Palestinian related, and then were totally surprised and outflanked by the jihadi movement (which as I said earlier, the US had blindly enabled in order to kill Russians in Afghanistan).  There is strong factual evidence to show that right through the Clinton administration there was a major effort to deal with that new enemy and that it was a challenge unlike any the US had faced during the Cold War - so generally our intelligence services were totally unprepared for it and on the tail end of a huge learning curve.  However they were beginning to have some success circa 1999/2000. 

OK, step forward to the Bush election and administration and priorities...which were all old school and out of synch with the new threat.  Bush steps back in time and sets a new set of global priorities and Rice and the rest of his appointees parrot those and the only old overs who do know CT get largely ignored....so was that all intentional or just incompetent, my call is incompetent.  

Sorry, its really a long story...but to answer your question,  the jehadi's had already attacked Americans and American forces overseas, they had already tried the Bojinka airliner attacks, they had already tried domestic attacks inside the U.S. with  the Millennium plots....so you have to pick whether or not they simply adapted Bojinka and actually targeted American cities or somebody stepped in and patsied them?  Personally I think they had all the help they needed, but it came from Saudis Arabia and probably Pakistan and not the neocons (as much as I dislike them).

Rice definitely played a key role in refusing give a priority to their counter terrorism advisors - Richard Clarke - being a prime example; she provably blocked their access (on the topic as a whole) to the NSC and that meant that agency figures like the head of the FAA were not pushed to take precautionary measures.  Ashcroft was another major blocker given that his priority was "law enforcement" not terrorism.  Bush himself failed to advise either Rice or Ashcroft of the very strong August 6 warning  he had received from the CIA about Bin Laden's desire for a major strike in the U.S.

But actually I was referring to lower level officials inside the CIA who failed to share foreign intel with the FBI domestically according to protocol, and  FBI headquarters officers who also failed to respond to warnings.. The IG for the CIA was particularly upset about certain incidents.

Beyond that, a strong case can be made that both the FAA Director and in particular the NORAD commander failed in their duties, the 9/11 committee really wanted to go after the NORAD commander but Rice managed to assert a lot of influence and block that....you can find all this in the committee materials, several of the members were not at all pleased.  I my personal view Rice was very much responsible for covering up a lot of the sins as well as minimizing Saudi involvement.

Jim, there is simply a huge body of solid evidence demonstrating that witnesses' memories begin to stray from the actual facts of an event even hours and days after the event.  I'm sure you are familiar with these studies. Part of it is perceptual, part influenced by information they encounter, etc.  Tests have shown that after some period of time, months and certainly years people telling a version of a story can be shown their original statements or even their written records made at the time and deny they are correct...they have overlaid their memories to the point of denying themselves.

Now of course that applies largely to details, to timing, to descriptions etc.  If they saw a car wreck, they remember seeing a car wreck...can you trust the color they remember, the number of people they saw, the comments they quote etc....that becomes more questionable.

Certainly I would not throw out all later day interview data, but it needs to be consistent and corroborative.  And I would question it as to what level of detail they are describing.  I'm a firm believer in "first day" comments overriding interviews made years later, that has nothing to do with faked materials or falsified evidence.  I'm also a firm believer in the risk of overreach i.e. finding what you are looking for.....I've seen it happen way to often and I have seen first hand how sincere (and not sincere) researchers can unintentionally "expand" witness content though interaction/feedback with them.

So am I conservative on witnesses, yes....am I possibly overcautious...maybe....but that's the way I approach my research, nobody else has to be burdened by it. As my guru Ricky Nelson said in a song..."You can't please everybody so  you might as well please yourself".  

I'm inclined to think he got fed up, there was a lot of push-back from FBI HQ and the new AG going on, the CIA was withholding information from the FBI, etc.  One of the reasons I tackled 9/11 in the book was to show how well the threat and warning system can work, as it did under Clinton with the Bojinka and Millennium terror plots which were aborted, and how badly it was working under Rice and Bush.

Rice was playing hardball with several of the counter terror guys who wanted to get attention and do things but if it was not a Bush priority she stonewalled them. That's the really nasty story and I tell it in considerable detail....there should have been charges filed against multiple people for dereliction of duty...and actually at least two different IG's recommended doing so but were overridden by the agency bosses .

About all I can say is that I have followed the ins and outs of this for a long time, being especially interested in some connections to the Mexican restaurant which was in front of the parking lot where the car was sighted, possible connections to where Oswald was dropped off by the taxi,  a connection to the House on Harlandale, etc. It drives me nuts.  I also find it hard to believe the FBI interviewed his wife twice and not him...but thinking his security clearance would stop them is nonsense, sure he had a clearance if he worked on one of the presidential aircraft for a military contractor but that would mean nothing to the FBI investigating a crime.  I also don't really trust any interviews made decades after the fact, there is just too much evidence of a variety of problems with such delayed statements.

But this certainly would not be the only lead the FBI blew with a superficial inquiry, look how badly they failed on the whole house on Harlandale lead or with Odio. 

My gut tells me there is something important here but what it is eludes me.

Well I answered your question so as I said, I will leave the subject to you....my only additional thought was at the time I had been following al Qaeda and the jihadi terror activities for something like two years and within one hour of seeing strikes on both towers I told my wife that the only reasonable candidate would be jihadi terrorists affiliated with that organization and under the overall direction to attack the west and specifically the US that Bin Laden had issued in his two calls for jihad.  You will have to take my word for that since my media impact was nil.

OK, that I can do.  Let's suppose Bin Laden convinced someone early on that he was key to making the campaign against the Russians work and became some sort of CIA contact, asset, what have you for that purpose.  He might also have offered all sorts of information about the nasty jihadi's who could be a danger to everybody. sort of like Oswald offered to inform on anyone who contacted him after his trip to Russia...or later offered to assist in other ways.

So you have both as "assets".....that would be perfectly reasonable, heck Oswald could have been doing it because the liked spy games and Bin Laden because he was a fanatic.  I can cite several other individuals who managed to fool both the CIA and FBI at different times in a similar fashion.  As to Bin Laden, for some time things were working so well and so many Russians were getting killed that the CIA Chief of station refused to acknowledge any warnings about the jihadis and I assume that would include Bin Laden.

Lets even go further and say Bin Laden fed a few other doubles into the system and the CIA worked with them as potential penetration assets....they were truly desperate to catch up to terror attacks so that's conceivable .  

How long would that go on, how much would the CIA tolerate...could be a lot...would they let Bin Laden issue a manifesto...maybe...would they let him call for attacks against the US...hard to believe but I can show you FBI assets that were important enough in Klan busting to let them commit murder and not disclose or prosecute them.  In a similar vein I can show you instances where the CIA got badly taken, by people that did indeed go on to commit terror attacks and crimes.

So, we get to Dallas and we get to 9/11 and deep in the files there are contact reports,  perhaps money issued, records of meetings, memorandum approving ongoing contact in spite of public sins (Bin Laden issuing a manifesto, Oswald going on radio praising Castro) etc.  When will those documents be released....I suspect never because they would have been soft files never entered in the system or pulled out of it and destroyed. 

Which of course does not mean that the CIA as an institution told Oswald to shoot Kennedy or Bin Laden to attack New York and Washington.  What it certainly does mean, and which I fully support, is that when an intelligence agency (or the military) does something that seems sane at the time, goes really off the rails later, when it gets had, then it covers its blunder as best it can and that includes destruction of documents.  An example of that with another agency would be the NSA and the national security advisor and  the Gulf of Tonkin...another story but illustrating the same CYA. I'm writing about yet another CIA operation which included destruction of both CIA and a military service documents right now. 

So to answer  your question....most likely never.  Which will also mean no conspiracy theory about anything ever dies ....

I'll leave you to it .... there is no way I would (or could) address the entire world of 9/11 conspiracy here;  any more than I can the entire world of JFK conspiracy for that matter.  I may not have learned much in the past thirty or so years of self education on  national security and military history topics but I've definitely learned that. 

Steve Coll writes good history; he does not write conspiracy......but hey, everybody gets to take their pick.

Its easy to present certain of the claims mention but I would need to see sources and citations to really discuss them objectively.  As to bin Laden working with the CIA before 9/11,  it depends what "working" means.  He was getting money channeled through the Saudi's, some of it possibly US money and he was working with rebel groups in Afghanistan which the US was in theory supporting...just not directly with CIA field officers.  As to afterwards...I would have to see something more than a claim.

As to the suppression of reports by FBI HQ....I think "non-responsiveness" would be a better term but I do write about that extensively in Surprise Attack and attribute blame to both the CIA and FBI as the evidence dictates. The CIA did definitely suppress data but apparently to preserve assets it was trying to develop within the jehadi movement.

On evidence directly linking bin Laden to the airplanes and the aircraft team...what would you want?   As the head of the movement he gave overall orders to attack the US, you can see it in his published calls to jehad.  There is no doubt about that; was he the tactical director of the individual missions like Bojinka etc....no, you don't do that and preserve compartmentalization.  That's not the way any good operation is set up (we see the same thing with JFK).  You incite it, you get the message to the write people and you step back from the operation.

But I'm honestly not going to try to persuade anyone who believes much of this anymore than many of the conspiracy scenarios for JFK.  I've presented an analysis of 9/11 in Surprise Attack (specifically in the context of threat and warnings intelligence and command and control) and I will discuss or defend that point by point, as I would on anything I put in print.  That's really the best I can offer.

Ghost Wars and his new Directorate S on Afghanistan,  bin Laden and the Saudi connection to the growth and evolution of the  jihadi movement are unsurpassed.  Ghost Wars was a major source for me in my writing on the path from Afghanistan to the 9/11 attack.

And yes I would agree on the CIA not standing up to ZIA but I think it was bigger than that, segments of Congress wanted Russian heads as did the National Security Advisor and the leading members of the NSC...nothing else much mattered, the CIA was quite literally given the order just to go kill Russians in Afghanistan.

I would also agree with Anthony,  in the decades following 9/11 the internet has become a terrible source of chaff and clutter on these sorts of topics....

Hi John, yes our research to date has corroborated virtually everything about the information he provided to the ARRB....some of which we fed back to him in the interview, shocking him a bit because he assumed it had been kept confidential.

David Boylan and I have been working this lead for some months now and I presented a first draft research paper last November in Dallas....you will find a link to it in the blog post below.  We have gone much further than that now, I think we are in version 6.0 of our research document and I suppose we need to get that in circulation soon.  I had hoped we might finally resolve the Red Bird mystery pilot as part of this story but so far we have been unable to locate the one guy who may have been able to tie that down...although we have shared the name with some excellent researchers who may run it to ground.

Basically it has let me back to two tracks which both connect to Rip Robertson and point towards a set of people who went to Dallas, some as the shooter team and others in support roles.  While I admit that may not be the full story (there are some connections to Tracy Barnes which I'm still pursuing) its my personal view that it gives us a great deal of the story about the actual attack in the Plaza.   Wheaton never claimed to know any details, he simply heard some names mentioned as being involved and it is those names which we have been pursuing.  Check the link in this blog post for the first version of our research paper. :

https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/the-wheaton-names-continued/

To be totally honest I do check such things as names and titles when I blog;  when I write for publication do that and then I rely on editors or on occasion pay supplemental editors myself.  However when I post on forums or Facebook I normally don't,  probably a sin but hopefully a minor one.  As to the punctuation, I think of it as being creative - my wife and my editors seem to have other opinions.

Actually I delve into that as part of my 9/11 chapters in Surprise Attack.

I would absolutely say that there were Saudi's were involved in sponsoring and enabling the attacks;  it gets quite confusing because there is an under layer of radical Islamism in Saudi comparable to that within Pakistani intelligence.  And Saudi is particularly hard to read (or was) considering its autocracy and fiefdoms...which Bin Laden was part of for a good while. They gave him a pass to act outside the country just as Pakistan gave the radicals the same deal - looked good for a time but that never lasts.

Bottom line, Saudi charities and individual wealthy Saudi's did support the attack, some knowingly, some in denial and all of them telling lies after the fact.  Actually the FBI and the 9/11 Commission had a strong case for Saudi complicity but Rice in particular and Bush in support managed to keep that largely out of the report.

Now for CIA involvement.....both the CIA and FBI were desperately seeking informants on al Queda and they got rolled as they always do....by that I mean individuals who were radicals pretended to volunteer, got training, provided a mix of information and in the end the CIA had to cover that up to a certain extent out of embarrassment and operational security.   Not really much different than being stung by the KKK or the Mafia years ago;  you are always at risk trying to penetrate any organization. The CIA got stung repeatedly around the globe by dealing with exiles and ex-patriots.

In this case the CIA got stung the most because it was cultivating potential sources and even assets and withholding information from the FBI; I write about that a lot and so have others. 

So Saudi "trainees", yes just a question of who and what for, same trade-craft works around the world...look up the Bojinka air attacks out of Indonesia.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

The CIA, possibly with one or two of them who were being prepared as penetration agents and who either got turned or were doubles to begin with....its a nasty business.

That's my overall cut at it.

Sorry Joseph,  I'm 72 and I admit to not being precise in some things...this would be one of them...feel free to correct my punctuation as well...

Yes and No and sorry but I'm going to do it again because I spent chapter after chapter addressing this in Shadow Warfare...mea culpa

Bottom line....in Afghanistan phase one the CIA sent money through Pakistan and partnered with Saudi to send even more money.  Nobody cared where the money went as long as Russians got killed. And the Pakistani intelligence was literally allowed to run the entire show, with no CIA  field involvement or oversight....

In reality the Saudi's and their ultra religious wing wanted the money to go to very specific jihad oriented groups as did the Pakistani's...and it did.  CIA teams did not go in with it nor exercise normal field control of any sort.  We just shoveled money to the Pakistani's, the Saudi's sent even more money and Bin Ladin went with it to ensure the right groups got it, establishing his base first in Pakistan and then Afghanistan.

In phase two, other non jihad nationalist groups in Afghanistan complained they were being cut out of the money but as more and more Russians were being killed the CIA station chief in Pakistan was in no way going to sacrifice his primary goal of  victory over the Russians over a few religious complaints. 

Finally, in phase three, things had gotten so bad that when we tried to send CIA folks into the field in Afghanistan to check they were threatened and sent packing by jihad militia - but by that point it was totally out of control and the Taliban was set to take the country back for the jihad (not for the old line nationalist or royalist Afghans...who eventually ended up forming the  Northern Alliance - who would be our new post 9/11 friends).

But we had shipped in anti-aircraft missiles, taken down lots of Hind gun ships, bloodied the Russians and made them look really bad, got our revenge for Vietnam and every politician involved took a bow......and promptly chose to ignore the whole bloody mess and how much we had been taken by the Saudi's and Pakistani's - until 9/11.

Oh, and on your other point, the first warning of exactly how bad things had gotten was when CIA intel from Bosnia began to show that the same jihad groups the Pakistani's and Saudi's had funded in Afghanistan were showing up as well organized units in Bosnia...with plenty of weapons and plenty of money, stockpiled from the Afghan funding no doubt, but with new investments from Bin Laden and their own "charitable" fund raising.

That's the short story, the citations are in the book...grin.

Jim, at this point all I can do is refer you to Surprise Attack which cites several field news investigations (generally not mainstream media) out of Libya and Syria as well as separate data on monitoring of air transport flights from the Gulf States to the jihad militia.  I go into it in a good bit of depth in Surprise Attack (and cite sources and links)  including my own analysis of how the pieces appear to fit together for that scenario, but I'm working on a new book and doing a number of other projects and honestly I have time to do more than point it out. Don't mean to be cryptic and I'm not pitching books but sometimes its a little frustrating to realize how little some of my more recent national security related work has been read within this community. 

Oh, and by "to put" I meant CIA field personnel under in cover in Syria screening militias and working up the contacts to move in weapons collected by the large, covert CIA field team in Benghazi and then shipped by boat to specific vetted militias....the weapons being Russian weapons out of Libya which would support a cover story of them coming from capture of similar weapons from Assad's forces, which was occurring a good deal at the time.  One shipment had already gone in, using Libyan shipping company contacts set up by our Ambassador; the same company he was scheduled to meet with again on his Benghazi trip.

I've written about many of these operations in Shadow Warfare and more current ones in Surprise Attack.  There is evidence that we were in the process of sending weapons from Libya to Syria (one boatload had gone out)  but not to Al Qaeda but to carefully screened non-jihad militias.  Al Qaeda operatives found out about it and killed our ambassador in Libya who was actually orchestrating the shipments as part of an effort to derail the effort (which worked like a charm for them).  As a corollary Some of the Gulf States stepped in with shipments to the Jihad groups and further undermined the effort as well.

To complex to discuss here but if anyone has Surprise Attack they will find it addressed in the analysis of the attack on Benghazi.  And yes both CIA and State were involved, but it was actually a very early effort to put the non-jihad militias which was compromised and failed.   As usual what I was able to learn at the time is in the book.