Larry Hancock

To that point I can definitely say that anybody that reads John's book is going to have a very hard time not concluding that more than one gun and one shooter was involved. Or that Wolfer was very well aware of the evidence for that.

Joan, all I am asking for is for you to give me one specific citation that a nuclear bomb loaded Navy aircraft was dispatched to intentionally bomb Cairo with a atomic weapon..that's it. Some specifics on the aircraft and its bomb load (fission vs. fusion; kiloton vs. megaton) as well as who ordered the atomic bombing would be helpful. That is what I need to begin circulating queries to the military historians I have in mind. For those not familiar with Navy atomic weapons this gives some good background. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&ei=hh9GXLKuFsib_Qa77IO4Dg&q=navy+atomic+bomb+capable+aircraft&oq=navy+atomic+bomb+capable+aircraft&gs_l=psy-ab.12...6858.9987..11767...0.0..0.447.2647.2j9j3j0j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71j33i10.AO7J81n1_es As I mentioned I can very well imagine a ready alert nuclear aircraft might have been launched as one of the few standby aircraft available to try and bring some appearance of relief to the Liberty, that would have been a high risk decision but might well have been made (and have been talked about afterwards) - it would certainly have been a worry and a potential career buster for the officer who ordered it. However it would be far different from an actual order to knowingly atom bomb Cairo. I've tried to make it clear that I was not speaking to the overall attack on the Liberty, the Israeli complicity or Johnson's treasonous decisions in regard to recall of the aircraft or the cover up of the intentional attack. If you have a vetted Navy source that is willing to give evidence that an atomic attack on Cairo was ordered and by whom, that is something that can be further researched and I am eager to pursue it - simply because it is not present in any of the many military works on atomic weapons, their command and studies of atomic weapons accidents. If not I'm also happy to refrain from further comment.

It will be worth the wait! John was a meticulous investigator and spent most of his time in the special RFK collections and archives as well was in querying experts in ballistics, forensics, etc. You didn't see him that much on the forums in in general dialogs however the few folks who worked directly with him have nothing but praise for his work - among other things he was a professional model maker and did physical 3D reconstructions and measurements to correlate against the official crime scene photos and official measurements. The results were well worth the effort. I'll leave it at that, his book will speak for itself.

Yes, he passed away in early Fall, very sad....Debra and Stu and I were all talking with him and communicating right up to the point of his finishing his manuscript and planning to come to Dallas and present on his work. Then we all got busy working on the conference and with no warning at all Debra heard from his sister that he had passed. You can read the obituary here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newportri/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=190719268 John was a gentleman and a devoted scholar; his death is a real loss to the research community, Larry

Good news Ron, John Hunt - a meticulous and devoted researcher - spent almost two decades specifically examining the medical, ballistics, and crime scene evidence related to the murder of RFK. His work and his 500 page plus manuscript - with literally hundreds of exhibits - was completed only months before his untimely death last fall. He allowed Stu Wexler and I to review and make comments and we presented an overview of it at the JFK Lancer conference in November. JFK Lancer will be publishing his work posthumously, hopefully this year, however it is a massive project considering the number of images and documents involved. It most definitely includes the two track issue. We all wish it was available now; it is truly an awesome piece of work and will be a tribute to his devotion to the case.

Thanks B.R., we are well into Version 5 now , the paper is basically a working reference for us - which is why it has so many links. David just keeps finding more than I can keep up with - and along the way we are working with Bill Simpich to keep adding crypts to the MFF crypt index. Each crypt we can find which relates to a base, a station, or a person opens up doors for new searches. And along the way we are finding new documents, such as the investigative report on Homer Echeverria which I just blogged on today. That one took two-three weeks of background work just to get comfortable with what I posted today. Back to slogging...

Paul, that's a much broader question than I'm prepared to give a simple opinion on yet. What I will say is that we are examining a scenario with two separate tracks and largely compartmentalized individuals. One has to do with how Oswald came into view by the Dallas conspirators, how he was contacted and eventually framed in Dallas....a tangent to that would be how Ruby and some other Dallas locals were brought into minor roles. That track is separated from the tactical scenario involving highly trained and experienced paramilitary types with a multi-year history of anti-Castro operations and links to WAVE maritime operations both before and after the Bay of Pigs. That's not a tease, and its not all that different than a lot of what I presented in SWHT, but taking it to the next level requires connecting dots and providing context and a great deal of obsessive level detail that tends to be pretty consuming. You know by now that I'm more than a little conservative, I'll post what I can on my blog as we proceed to tie pieces together but its all very much still a work in progress, even though the remarks by Wheaton appear to have been a critical starting point. As for that matter are the Ray January remarks from Red Bird...and yes, that was a tease...

No it was not Kerry, as a matter of fact the Senator was not a well known national name....and I don't recall who it was off the top of my head. Stu Wexler did follow up on that name as well as others that Wheaton mentioned (including the media person Wheaton mentions who was very cooperative but had little new to say as his conversations with Wheaton had been about more current events of the time and only very peripherally about JFK). Given that Jenkins and Quintero turned down Wheaton's offer to approach the Senator and at that point said they would work to discredit him if he ever went public (which he did not), that was about all there was to it. Jenkins appears to have felt much more strongly about the matter; Quintero was a very good friend of Wheaton and might have been willing eventually to do something if he had been on his own...as reflected in a reported remark from him that John Simkin posted.

For those interested, several of us including David Boylan, Bill Simpich, and myself as well as Bill Kelly and others are conducting ongoing research on the Wheaton lead and I presented on that research and a related paper at the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas last November. An early version of that research monograph is online and will be updated as our work proceeds. I have been posting on the new Wheaton research and will continue to on my Worldpress blog: https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/the-wheaton-names-continued/

Joan, I referenced my own only in order to cite my sources and to give the larger issue of command and control problems with a number of these NSA collections missions which were subject to a very confusing chain of communications and command issues...not just the Liberty in the Med. but the destroyer missions in the Tonkin Gulf and the Pueblo off Korea. If you note in my messages I discussed the fact that nuclear strike aircraft were routinely on alert and sometimes were the only initial aircraft available for dispatch - that occurred with the Pueblo in the Pacific - and might indeed have been dispatched as some of the earliest aircraft available on the carrier that could be sent aloft to support the Liberty. If you give me a source that says that nuclear strike aircraft were specifically sent to strike Cairo with atomic weapons - that Inman himself order the nuclear strike or can be quoted as receiving a nuclear attack order (which technically requires several steps including a code to activate the specific weapons involved) - that would be something very different and I would most definitely look into it not only with your book but at other sources. If Inman is officially on record as having personally ordered a nuclear strike on Cairo it will certainly be news within the military history community and I definitely want to look bring that source/s on that to the attention of a number of those historians. It would be really good to have the details on the weapons released for the attack but obviously he would know and remember that.

I'm glad you found it useful Ron, that''s great. Again, without inserting myself into Lisa's thread - and because I have not read her book, still slogging on some new JFK work myself, I suspect that one of our differences might be that I found focused on the extended evidence that Sirhan was essentially playing his own mind games. In doing so he was mentored and initially encouraged by his friend Rathke, expanded by his readings in Rosicrucian techniques including visualization and possibly enhanced by his hypnosis by stage magicians in local clubs and in his Rosicrucian experience. His family talks of observing his self hypnosis sessions and he was open to his friends about his new "powers", including his belief he could mentally influence others including his mother. Clearly he was into mind games, so much so that the warning note from Rathke (discovered by Rose Lynn Mangan) that if he did not stop something terrible might happen, is quite telling. One other point that is in my essays, which might not have been mentioned by Lisa, is my work on the LA assistant district attorney who Sandra Serrano spoke to outside the Ambassador hotel before reentering, talking to the police and then appearing on TV. The ADA's statement is especially telling in that it verifies Serrano's remarks totally independently and puts lie to the idea that she made it up after talking with the bus boy. This is particularly important because multiple letters from the ADA are in the LAPD police files and had to be known to Hernandez and his boss - so when Hernandez harassed her and literally forced her to admit that she had made it up after talking to the busboy (legally certifying that statement as true) he was certifying a known and provable lie - thereby making all his other police work tainted. A good lawyer who did the same discovery in the files that I did would have cut the legs out from under his testimony and immediately challenged the entire LAPD investigation in doing so. For those who want to hear how truly bad his interview was, I'll put in a link below. Beyond that I was also able to contact a well respected, professional polygraph operator who reviewed the interview and stated that it violated numerous areas of protocol, including establishing the benchmark questions, and could easily have been challenged in court. http://rfktapes.com/5-the-girl-in-the-polka-dot-dress/

Ron, the first thing to note is that this diagram and all the diagrams in my series of essays were created from LAPD crime scene drawings that were obtained from the Melanson archive...what you see is as only as good or bad as the official case files he obtained. Debra's sister Sherry was kind enough to prepare the graphics in my essay from those drawings. As you probably noted, those diagrams are in the first of several other sections of my essay and there is more commentary on the movements of the PDG, her associates and witnesses in the other sections...I'd certainly recommend reading the whole thing as the diagrams were intended to work with my text...so they may or may not work well with Lisa's. I'd have to revisit the whole thing myself to give a definitive response but in my recollection there were several options for the attack and the exit and it appears to me that the attack itself was an iterative process with several contacts between various individuals that evening and ultimately the steering of Sirhan into the service pantry. There is certainly evidence one or more of the individuals involved was familiar with the hotel and the kitchen/pantry area. As to an exit route, there were options including moving down the side service halls to the exits, across the foyer, back down the pantry and out through the Colonial room or through the hall access door by the restrooms on the diagram. It was interesting to me that the security guard in one interview noted that during the speech someone tried to enter the stage from either the side or rear and he simply pushed them back - maybe he did, maybe not but if the shooting had occurred on stage there would have been options to exit through the other end of the service hall rather than running though the crowded pantry. In any event, if the diagrams help, great...if not, sorry. My own RFK research and essays are available to all on MFF. If anyone wants to discus those they can message or email me but I really don't want to butt in and insert myself into a thread about Lisa's book.

I checked with Bill and it appears that the Dr. Gonzales pseudo. was used by Morales during a few months period when he was stationed in Cuba circa 1959. He had a number of assignments but that particular name appears to have been used in his personal contacts with Manuel Artime - including help provided to Artime to get out of Cuba. His CIA contact with Artime also explains why Morales was the first person in the Agency that Artime contacted after being released from prison in Cuba after being captured during the Bay of Pigs landings.

Could you please provide a link to that Paul....I'd like to see it online. Bill and I discuss crypts frequently but if put that up I must have missed it? I will check with him as well.

In the late 50's Morales was assigned to Venezuela until 1958 and then moved to the the CIA station in Havana under State Department cover. He was closely involved with the Batista government, so much so that he was issued some type of Cuban law enforcement credentials (secret police) - the discovery of his name on a list of police credentials following the revolution put him under considerable scrutiny by the Castro regime and he was taken out of Cuba in July of 1959. After arrival in the US he was assigned to the Cuba project in Washington and by May he was in Miami setting up training operations for several special exile groups. During this period of time his crypt was Zamka. Over his career he used a variety of aliases including Nelson Raynock, Henry Boyson, Henry Beckoff and Raul Hernandez (aka Martin Ferrer) but I find no Gonzalez....could you give us your source for that. Thanks.

It would be interesting if you could put enough particulars around it to do some further resiearch....say at least the year of the meeting and its subject, perhaps what group Gonzalez was purportedly representing? Is there anything of that sort we can work with?

Ron, I think you will find some diagrams in this that might be useful as a reference on floorplans: https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Incomplete_Justice_-_At_the_Ambassador_Hotel.html

Paul, I would have to refer you to Newman's book - his second one - on the document citation. I discussed it with him in myself and he characterized it for me but I have not actually seen the specific LA related QJ/WIN document/s myself. Sounds like Hank has a copy or something similar but I have not seen that...its not something mentioned in the Ganis book so I'm waiting on Hank's book and doing other things at the moment. We know that the QJ/WIN crypt was used more than once and we know that Harvey used the crypt as part of his ZR/RIFLE project so those parts are consistent but I would be interested in precisely where this quote comes from "during the Church Committee , the CIA claimed they had a paid assassin as an employee... claimed served as a spotter of talent." It would surely be a first for the CIA to admit that they employed a paid assassin"? Of course the CIA did admit to the Church committee that they had an employee who was a "spotter of talent" and that he was also directed to support the poison effort against Lumumba - but that's a bit different than the CIA admitting to "employing a paid assassin". That I'd like to see.

Totally understand Ron, its just one of the myriads of mysteries that have been in play for decades. Certainly its something the Church committee looked into it at length and they collected a variety of documents related to the crypt and William Harvey, including the Belgian QJ/WIN's employment history, and his actual pay record. Newman's findings in regard to LA are much more recent and I assume that was what Hank provided - both Ralph Ganis and Hank bring QJ/WIN into their work in a major way. I've been researching and presenting on it for several years and John's find in regard to a California appearance of the crypt was new to me as well. I know others want it to be more significant than it appears to me so I'll leave that to them....I just wanted to butt in and so that we do have a lot of information on the crypt at this point, although no doubt there is more to be learned.

Thanks Ron, previously I've posted, written and presented on QJ/WIN and the relationship of the crypt to ZR/RIFLE at great length over a number of years now so I would hope someday it seems less mysterious. John Newman's work expanded the picture by letting us know that the crypt had been associated with individuals associated with drug dealing as far back as the 1950s in the Los Angeles area so that helped clear up the appearance of QJ/WIN as a crypt later used out of the CIA station in Belgium. Based on Church committee documents we also know that the QJ/WIN individual from that office had been used for some years (and in the Congo, because he held a Belgian passport) before he was handed off to Harvey as a spotter for growing Staff D resources in Europe. Of course Harvey then decided to use the ZR/RIFLE crypt within Staff D to hide the assassination project he got from Helms. All this should be far less mysterious now than it used to be, especially the connection between the general QJ/WIN crypt and individuals involved in illegal drug activities.

John Newman mentions this in his work (second book I think) and I've posted on it here before; John discovered a reference to the use of the crypt by the CIA in liaison work with drug enforcement activities - in California. It appears the CIA was interested in drug traffickers as potential sources or assets (the same came up with Harvey being given QJ/Win as a Belgian asset). I've found a number of complaints from DEA about about the CIA wanting to share lists of suspects, and then essentially pirating them as assets.

Kirk, that description would be a little over the top for me " Hunt is a big mouthed, bungling, CIA hack". Hunt did have some value; at least one senior CIA officer was impressed by his spy novels and felt they were good PR for the Agency. He was able to establish some solid personal relationships, primarily with devoutly anti-Communist surrogates like Artime. He was also viewed as being extremely loyal to the Agency above virtually anything else....someone who to use an Angleton term was part of the "cadre". His social contacts within the Agency at the highest levels were largely due to his long career and his loyalty. I will leave this discussion of Watergate to others such as Jim D, personally I think Hunt may well have been maneuvered into a position to essentially infiltrate Nixon's advisors and that Nixon was perceived as a potential threat to the Agency. I'm certainly open to the idea that Hunt might have actually sabotaged the White House at Watergate, then again his security procedures and tradecraft had been questionable on other occasions. Better minds than mine will have to settle that question.

I know its not nice to throw cold water on these conversations but it would be really good for those interested to look at the actual details of Hunt's career, at his personnel file and at the real facts about his assignments - beginning with his being fired after running the Mexico City station for only a brief time in its earliest days though his later assignments (which were all political action - translation, meeting with CIA supported exiles, revolutionaries, etc and handing out funding), to his essentially kicking himself out of the Cuba project at the last minute because he could not get along with certain exile leader's politics - all the way to the way he actually handled his team under Nixon, before and at Watergate. Hunt did have friends at the top if the CIA...who admired his spy fiction and thought it was good for the agency. He had also been part of the earliest cadre and gained much of his reputation from riding along with the work of Phillips, Hecksher and Morales in Guatemala and PBSUCCESS. Then a good look at the AMWORLD files circa 1963 and later and see how the real operators like Morales and Hecksher were irate about Hunt was reasserting himself with Artime and was using Artime to try and get himself back into mainstream projects....and finally, read Eugenio Martinez articles on how Hunt recruited him and ran the Nixon related burglaries and get a feel for the quality of Hunt's actual covert tradecraft. In other words, get the full picture....then decide if David Morales would invite Hunt to a motel room in Miami (a motel Hunt could never name on a date he could not name) and offer him an invitation into a plot to kill the president and then just let Hunt take a pass and walk away...before the assassination).

Kirk, sorry but you really are not going to get any more detail from me rather than my personal statement that the individual in question had more than enough facts and history to substantiate his remarks. You will just have to take that assurance...or not, your choice. As to my remarks on Hunt, they are in the 2010 edition of my book SWHT...and were developed entirely separately given the total lack of corroboration for Hunt's purported confession and generally the silliness of it in regard to his known history and that of the individuals he mentioned....one point being that Morales was actually on record in an internal memo that Hunt was a loud mouth and never could be trusted not to compromise security. For that matter even Hecksher had generated very negative memos about Hunt in 1963 - anybody who thinks Hunt was trusted among the real covert operators really has an incomplete picture of Hunt. Having said that, Hunt talked to everybody he could, picked up lots of gossip- with his main Cuban source being Artime. It would certainly not surprise me if he, as many within select parts of the Cuban community in Miami, did not hear gossip about the broad outlines of what had gone down in Dallas.

Just for comparison, take a look at another JFK motorcade in the fall of 1963