Larry Hancock

Without getting into the larger question of atom bombing Cairo well after the Israeli air strikes had largely destroyed the Egyptian air force I have to say that there will always be a record of the use of an atomic weapon (obviously you can't use one on Cairo without the world knowing it happened so its not going to be a secret operation).  The point being that by 1967, based on programs that JFK had implemented, all weapons were under positive control which means a whole series of communications starting with National Command authority (President/SecDef) extending through the Joint Chiefs, through the regional military commander and the force commander (who legally "owns" the weapons).  National Command authority releases them for use. Along with release confirmations positive access control codes are separately supplied to activate the weapons.  The idea of doing this without a "paper trail" really does not pass muster.

As the the Liberty, the best sources I could find (and there were multiple Navy and government investigations) show that upon being attacked the Liberty signaled for assistance but that it took 50 minutes for the situation to be assessed at Fleet command level in the Mediterranean  (the attackers could have been Egyptian, Russian, Israeli and for that matter the Liberty was not operating as a Navy unit under Navy control even though it was a flagged US ship). Only after some 50 minutes were the carriers America and Saratoga  given actual launch orders to each send four armed aircraft to the scene. The Liberty was advised of that and only then was a CRITIC national emergency message transmitted from the fleet to Washington.  After receipt of the CRITIC some 15 minutes were spent locating and briefing SecDef.  At that point LBJ was advised, and he ordered SecDef to recall the aircraft, still well away from the Liberty and with the Liberty under air and boat attack. The Navy Fleet commander entered a protest and was overridden.  An NSA officer was who was present during the discussions and at the issuance of the order was so enraged he wrote a sealed memo detailing the recall). 

There were clearly huge problems in communications, command and control, before and during the attack on the Liberty.  All of which I write about in Surprise Attack. Numerous people should have been disciplined and LBJ should have been impeached, charged and imprisoned.  But that's another story - unfortunately its a much more deadly story than similar events involving electronic surveillance vessels which occurred in  the Tonkin Gulf earlier and later with the Pueblo off Korea. 

Having personally heard RFK speak during his presidential campaign I can certainly say that by that point in time he and everyone else never called it anything other than "Johnson's war"....guess you had to be there.

Ron, I'm aware and wrote about the jet launches from the carriers (you will recall I mentioned that during much of the Cold War many of the ready alert aircraft overseas were nuke armed, specifically for a first response to any preemptive Soviet strike....the reason that the Pueblo received no assistance was that only nuke armed aircraft were available and by the time they could reconfigure with different weapons the ship had been seized).  Unfortunately nuke armed aircraft would be little use unless you put them right over the target and they managed to bluff off the attackers...of course putting them in that position with only fusion class weapons on board is a risk in itself. I'm assuming that the actual aircraft launched from the carriers were air defense fighters with weapons loads of machine gun and air to air missiles.

Would you mind giving me the specific source/citation for US nuke armed aircraft being in the air on direct flight paths to Cairo before the Liberty had either called for assistance or was attacked?  That's the part I'm really interested in...my sources show that there was a fifty minute delay between the first calls for help form the Liberty and the dispatch of any aircraft from both the Liberty and the Saratoga.

I'm assuming that Joan also discusses the point that we know about some of this because at one point in time when it was finally understood the attackers were Israeli there was discussion of ultimately sinking the Liberty so as not to embarrass the Israli's and one NSA individual was so enraged he wrote a memo for the record and locked it away for decades.

The air attacks against Egypt were over and done with and successful at the time of the Liberty attack - what was in progress was the rapid Israeli ground advance across Gaza and the Sinai.  So how does the sinking the Liberty prevent WWIII? 

On the other hand I probably should not have commented on this thread in the first place because it sounds like the discussion is going way beyond the factual and well documented command and control mistakes that I wanted to weigh on so I best stick with what I documented in Surprise Attack.

Ron,  actually I was speaking to the possibility of Israeli nuclear weapon's use, not American.  Israel has consistently denied it even has nuclear weapons although of there is no doubt of that, there is also no doubt they had tactical grade versions and the aircraft needed to deliver them...however officially and in terms of geopolitics that has always been their greatest national secret. 

However if you look at the nature of the 1967 war,  there actually seems little need for the nuclear threat - certainly not compared to the Egyptian attack which took Israel by surprise a few years later and could well have produced a nuclear threat as a counter to the initial Egyptian ground success.

In 1967 preemptive Israeli air strikes largely took out the Egyptian air force, destroying it with virtually no Israeli losses.  The Israeli ground advance caught the Egyptians totally by surprise and they rolled up Gaza and moved very quickly into the Sinai - leading to speculation that Israeli forces used unconstrained tactics, killing civilians and very possibly surrendering Egyptian forces. Its not my field of study but the rapid Israeli advance was spectacular and has raised questions about the possibility of war crimes.

There have also been conflicting stories of who started the air and ground combat, both sides blaming the other.  Certainly the Liberty could have collected messages which would have shown the Israel as the aggressor, and possibly something much worse.

As to an American atomic strike on Egypt, as far as I know that makes no military sense at all, Egypt had triggered the confrontation by closing the Suez but the preemptive response by Israel answered that quickly and dramatically.  

On 5 June, Israel launched what it claimed were a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields. Which side caused the war is one of a number of controversies relating to the conflict.

The Egyptians were caught by surprise, and nearly the entire Egyptian air force was destroyed with few Israeli losses, giving the Israelis air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israelis launched a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip and the Sinai, which again caught the Egyptians by surprise.

That would just be a guess Jim but based on some radio intercepts by the NSA aircraft off Italy there was no doubt an American ship was being attacked....and given the repeated attacks and the types of munitions involved it seems clear that the goal was probably the actual sinking of the ship and eliminating its crew.  My best guess (and others have made this before me) is that there was a  fear that field level messaging within the Israeli forces might have included orders that involved unintentional or even intentional attacks on civilians or surrendering Egyptian forces. That could well have been captured on tape on the Liberty. 

There could also have been message traffic related to the potential use of weapons would have been way outside of what the Israeli government wanted to have documented - its not out of the realm of possibility that tactical nuke strikes were at least discussed or that nuke carrying aircraft were in the air in case that decision was made. Message traffic relating to the protection the Dimona plant or of nuclear weapons storage facilities could have been involved. I personally recall the media coverage of how much a surprise and how successful the initial attacks on Israel were....its not hard to imagine that any and all options were not on the table.

If any of that had been intercepted and taped on the Liberty, it would have a) exposed war crimes or b) exposed nuclear capabilities - I have to guess that it was something on that order.

I'm afraid that sounds like a less than fully comprehensive discussion of the warnings and command and control process Ron,  there were definitely legitimate warnings sent and I believe at least some of them are discussed in the books Robert mentioned earlier. Discussion of the issues with the warnings definitely goes way beyond the actual receipt of messages on the Liberty - it involved major errors in routing, message transmission protocols and follow up.   As to the orders on the ship's movements, they came from the Pentagon and the movement of the ship and its assignment to monitor the conflict actually extended over a fairly long period of time because the ship was being relocated from the East Coast of Africa to fill in for another similar electronics ship that was going into a scheduled maintenance and refit. 

On the other hand I don't have a personal interest in either reviewing the book or getting into a lengthy discussion of Joan's sources.  If anyone here has read Surprise Attack they can continue - if interested.  Other than that I felt I should at least raise the issue and having done so I will defer to the discussion and sources in my own book (which is why I write books in the first place...certainly making detailed forum posts from memory is something I have also learned to avoid...grin).

Sorry Ron, I''m afraid I sent you off in the wrong direction.  The Liberty was warned that the fighting was escalating and that it had  moved into an increasingly exposed position - subject to attack by any and all forces engaged.  These were  situational warnings based on intelligence/threat assessments of the situation on the ground and in the air.  In the first instances the warnings were not to move as close to land as in the ships initial orders and after that there were actual directives to move further offshore and distance themselves. The reasons the orders were not communicated correctly and in some instances simply not received by the ship require you really dig into the communications traffic protocols and practices..

There was no specific knowledge of a pending attack, simply indications warnings of an increased threat from all parties in the combat and the warnings and directions were coming from within the intelligence community itself.  As I said, the ship itself was not under direct Navy control but assigned as an intel collection asset...the same thing happened repeatedly,  first in the Tonkin Gulf, then to the Liberty and then to the Pueblo.  The Pentagon always wanted the most detail and accurate technical collections available and ships with this duty were exposed to threats that might well have restricted their missions or done something to give them more cover if they had been part of regular Navy operations.  Assessing these sorts of incidents was one of the reasons I researched and wrote Surprise Attack - what I found was huge gaps in proper military command and control and very basic mission conflicts which exposed service personnel and on occasion produced exactly what you see with the Liberty.  No conspiracy but basically SNAFU.   I know that will probably disappoint many,  for the details and sources as to why I reached that conclusion I have to refer you to the book.

Thanks Jim, just ordered one of Jacobs books...

Robert, I have the same books and used that as well as more current information in my section on the Liberty in Surprise Attack.  One thing I would point out is that there were a series of warning messages sent to the Liberty and indeed the attacks themselves were monitored in real time on a NSA surveillance aircraft monitoring the entire conflict from an orbit over the Mediterranean.  Why those warnings and advisors were not received by or responded to by the Liberty is a story in Command and Control and tragically similar to the same thing the happened to the Pueblo.  If Joan does not include that sort of information in her book then it would be missing something substantial.  And of course another aspect of the story is that quick reaction aircraft, both Navy and Air Force, of that point in the Cold War were quite frequently nuclear equipped since first priority was responding to a Soviet preemptive strike.  That posed real problems for scrambling strike aircraft configured with an entirely useless set of weapons for actually defending surveillance ships like the Liberty and Pueblo (which were Navy ships operating under a separate command, yet another problem).  Note: none of that is a defense of LBJ whose reaction was loathsome...but that's a different story.

He sent me a copy of the book which I cannot seem to put my hands on at the moment...my recollection was that the meeting was sometime in the week or two following the assassination; certainly not that day  I should also be clear that the blowback I mentioned was financial in regard to his radio program and product sales.  He had immediately ordered all further recorded broadcasts which attacked JFK (which were rather common) and his policies to be canceled. Hunt was very aggressive about politics...as long as they helped and did not hurt sales.  Reportedly he did the same thing after the assassination of MLK.

He goes into considerable detail as to when and where he feels it occurred including the cash payment that he feels was involved. He was not a personal participant in the meeting itself.   One of the things he brings out in the book is that it was not unusual for Hunt to make cash payments as part of a fall back when something of national importance appeared to jeopardize the political attacks he had been making in his radio show...at the point where it might blow back and begin to affect revenues.

At this point in time there are probably enough books and enough stories to give anyone pause about virtually anything...and more will no doubt be forthcoming....  I should note that the idea of a Hunt meeting with Marina and a payment to her is something that has been circulating for a very long time...decades...

Hunt's aide (Curington) has a new book out and has spoken to researcher (he spoke at the CAPA event in Dallas). He makes it clear that he was familiar with Hunt's daily moments, that Hunt did not leave town immediately after the assassination and he makes no mention of any Hunt meeting other than with Marina Oswald.

From 1957 to 1963, Lansdale worked under the Department of Defense - he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations (that staff helped coordinate the use of U.S. military equipment and assets for use in covert operations, by the military and by the CIA). He was a staff member of the  President's Committee on Military Assistance, lastly served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. I don't think any of that has to do with Army Counter Intelligence (ASCI stands for Assistant Chief of Staff Intelligence) which is where the Army/Alpha 66 connection and interest was...based on the documents I recall.

As far as Veciana is concerned, my suspicion was and is that he did meet Phillips in Cuba since Phillips was in contact with the group there that Veciana associated with and which was planning an assassination attempt on Castro.  My assumption was that Phillips reconnected might have with him later but that the association was largely off the books and for Phillip's own information collection and purposes.   I was shocked to see the elaborations in Veciana's recent book and agree that John has done a fine job of demonstrating that Veciana's most recent revelations about being trained as an agent inside Cuba are not something that should be taken seriously...

Paul,  as early as 2006  I was writing about the Army's relationship with Alpha 66 and citing documents showing that Army counter  intelligence had an interest in Alpha 66 had actually assigned Veciana a source code designation (DUP 748).  It was clear from those documents that the Army's interest was in obtaining tactical intelligence about Russian forces inside Cuba but they were also very interested in obtaining captured Russian or Soviet bloc weapons for evaluation. In his exchanges with Army personnel Veciana had talked of the CIA trying to infiltrate or obtain information from the group but stated they were giving no assistance and that false information had been passed to the CIA. That did not seem to trouble Army CI and I don't recall their sharing that. The exact groups involved in the contact should be visible in the documents I cited.

The Army CI contact began in 1962 and continued into 1963.  If you have SWHT/2010 you might check starting with  p. 51 but its in other places in the book as well. The Army was certainly interested in them and in spring 1963 Army personnel on the new SGA even made a proposal to the Spcial Group to consider using them operationally (this was at a point when everybody was running around trying to find some new approach that had a vague possibility of ousting Castro). The CIA replayed that they felt the group was unreliable and would not be controllable.

In other places in the book I mention a remark on a CIA internal memo which suggests the CIA did have sources with contacts inside the group and advance knowledge of their missions. 

I have never seen any mention of Lansdale or even the the JCS staff special projects group where he served in 62/63 so if you could give a source on that it would be very interesting. 

It might be worth while checking if Baylor is still taking JFK materials.  The archivist who spearheaded that effort retired and I'm not sure they are continuing it.  It really is necessary to have a department or other champion if you want a University to take collections since its an effort that requires work and resources and there are never enough of either unless you produce a grant to house and sustain it.  Just leaving it as part of a will can be a fruitless effort if you don't get a commitment in advance.

While Johnson's actions in responding to news of the attack are despicable,  I need to point out that numerous warnings were sent to the Liberty and efforts were made to pull it back from its exposed position.  There were a number of communications problems involved as well as bungling over joint command of the ship between Navy, NSA and a special command in involved with such missions.  The whole thing was a fiasco not unlike to the Pueblo and for some of the same reasons.  For those who do have my book Surprise Attack, you will find those detailed in separate chapters.  Again, not unlike a number of similar disasters, the problem was not strictly lack of warning but the failure of the total chain of command - exponentially made worse and in this case by the total cupidity of Johnson and for that matter of the Israeli military which clearly knew exactly what it was doing. 

I think that is correct Paul,  and it did not happen as quickly as one might think.  In fact Mongoose carried on for a time until it became clear the Russians were going to take out their missiles (over Castro's objections).  By early 1963 it had faded away since the agreement precluded any overt American action against Cuba.  That put Lansdale out of a job and JFK tried to get him a position in Vietnam but both the CIA and State pushed back hard.  As for Harvey, it appears he just hung around the office for a few months, in his former pre-Mongoose/Task Force W role as head of staff D.  Not many folks for him to talk to except Angleton because it was obvious he had no real place at HQ with RFK around.  His assignment to Italy was low key, apparently more in the nature of a reward for service from Helms.

As far as assassinations go, we have considerable history to show that political assassinations could be directed (or encouraged) by CIA officers at the senior level of the Plans Directorate without higher authority of direction (Tracy Barnes being one example – before his Cuba project fiasco).  Hemisphere level directors could recommend assassination, J. C. King was first to recommend assassination Castro.  Beyond that we know that individual CIA officers within operations could incite and even organize assassinations…we find that from Guatemala to Chile and we also know of some military style project involving surrogates that were conducted by reasonably low level CIA officers. We are learning a lot more about some of those which targeted Castro …well before the Roselli poison effort got underway.  I try to cover those options in my book Nexus but more details are still emerging with further research.

History also shows us that presidents could deniably issue such directives as Ike did with Lumumba and Carter, Clinton and Bush did with national security directives.  In that case CIA simply takes its marching orders and tries to make it happen.

As far as Harvey was concerned, his only known involvement in assassination was setting up the “magic button” program (hidden inside ZR RIFLE among Staff D’s normal dirty tricks such as burglary, safe cracking and strong arm work) which brought in Roselli (previously involved with Barnes) to continue and effort to kill Castro.  We know that he turned to Angleton for advice on that project.  We also know that Angleton was one of the few folks still talking to him after the missile crisis and in the months he was in a sort of limbo before heading off to Italy.  We also know that during that period he remained in charge of Staff D, was copied on communications and met with Roselli and probably others from JMWAVE to officially close down the Castro project circa April, 1963…

So who could have gotten Harvey involved in something that led to the attack in Dallas, as for myself I’m still looking at Angleton.  There was a real bond between the two that lasted right up to Harvey’s death…although I have no doubt that if Harvey decided it needed to be done he was a man who would take the initiative on his own to make it happen.

In answer to Paul's post, certainly Ralph Gainis did present at the Lancer conference - for over an hour -  to a roomful of people.  Ralph's presentation was very structured, he covered his book well and he had clearly spent considerable time developing it for the conference. Stu Wexler and I also had the opportunity to talk with Ralph at lunch one day and at other times. Ralph was very open and we had some great conversations; he offered us access to his own research and we will be taking advantage of that offer as soon as is logistically possible - beginning this month we hope. 

I've read his book multiple times now and have been doing my usual deep diving on areas of context that are called out in it - I've generated about a dozen questions on areas where we really need to be able to dig into source materials to answer questions and Ralph was the first to admit that the method that his publisher imposed on citations made it extremely difficult to get the sort of specificity that many of us would like - hence his offer to work with us.

There are some related areas that I can do my own research in the meantime and I've been posting some of that on my WordPress blog.  Its probably no surprise to anyone that I'm obsessive about due diligence and that's where I am on this at the moment and probably will be for a good many months.  I should note that the book is not strictly chronological and because of that its really necessary to do some work putting all the elements in the right time frames to avoid making mistakes about things, nothing new there but just to affirm that its work that has to be done.

Now if we only knew where they had been and what they had been doing the couple of months before....also gotta say that it doesn't get much better than the "Black Nine",  old school CIA ops were hardly ever that spooky...

Haven't seen anything about a Castro contact yet, that's not in the Ganis book.  There is no mention of Merix in the book's index and I don't find it in my markings in the book which include all the commercial companies mentioned.  What is clear (and has been for some time) is that Skorzeny marketed his war time connections and served as a sort of "personnel recruiter", locating German scientists, engineers and military personnel and passing them on to interested parties - Argentina being the major client but he did actually help locate German rocket scientists for Egypt (including those he later led into being killed). 

Actually I researched Interarmco at considerable length and wrote about Sam Cummins and his companies in Shadow Warfare (focusing on global arms sales and on AMWORLD) and again to a lesser extent in Creating Chaos (focusing on Indonesia).  And no, Interarmco is not what Ralph was writing about in regard to Skorzeny.  

His references to Cuba have to do with a purported meeting with Batista after his ouster,  possible meetings with Cuban exile political figures in Madrid in the early 1960s and Skorzeny's involvement with Operation Tropical (which is sourced only to a single Latin American newspaper article).   Unfortunately the type of end-noting that Skyhorse used for Ralph's book makes it almost impossible to find the exact sources for some of these things (which frustrates Ralph himself) and he has been kind enough to offer Stu Wexler and I access to his own source materials. Its going to take us some work in those to fully appreciate and evaluate certain assertions in the book and Ralph is very understanding in that regard.

As a side note, we know from the records that one of Henry Hecksher's main roles was serving as a political/propaganda/security advisor to Artime (who had a real problem with talking about secure information to many people in order to establish his own importance).  As part of that role Hecksher was mentoring Artime on setting up propaganda programs and it appears David Phillips was brought in as an advisor in those activities. He was the only officer cleared for AMWORLD at the Mexico City station.   Phillips was also assigned to handle safe houses for the project in Mexico City.

Which makes David's post about Sambora interesting in that I would have expected only the most senior CIA officers supporting the project or the most senior exiles involved in it to go to Mexico City to meet with Phillips. That makes Sambora/the "mexican" a very special figure at that point in time.

Anyone wanting to follow the release of the records and new items in them might want to follow the Mary Ferrell postings on the release process - and survey the following early synopsis by Bill Simpich:

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/07/26/analyzing-the-new-jfk-revelations/