Larry Hancock

I'll check and let you know Ron...

Ron, I certainly hope you can make it, the conference is a unique chance to meet and explore subjects in depth in a way that is really not possible in any other fashion.  That's why we make a real effort to facilitate time and places for all the attendees to really meet and talk at some length with presenters.  And yes, its pretty much at everyone's own expense, which does show a lot of commitment.

I live about six hours drive away myself and after a decade or so of driving in the roads have become almost as familiar as the airport used to be...

JFK Lancer will be hosting its annual November in Dallas program on November 16-18.

This year the agenda will include presentations on three of the major political assassinations of the 1960s - JFK, MLK and RFK. 

The conference will feature names well known to many of you, including authors John Newman, Russ Baker, William Law, Bill Simpich and Stuart Wexler.

An extensive discussion of the JFK X-rays will be conducted by medical professions Mike Chesser and David Mantik, with participation by autopsy witness Jim Jenkins. Jim, assisted by William Law, will also introduce his own, brand new book.

John Hunt, known for his obsessively detailed research into the LAPD investigation of the murder of Robert Kennedy, will present on his findings and discuss his own upcoming (and long awaited) book.  I've read John's manuscript and I assure you its something you don't want to miss.

Bill Simpich will be presenting on a subject other than Mexico City, focusing on his more recent research on the Dallas Police - I will join him in a question and answer session based on my own research and on the work of George O'Toole among others.

Gary Murr will bring us some of his own unique research - with a presentation titled:  A Small Arms Dealer and the Death of a President

In addition John Orr will be joining us from the CAPA event that week, to discuss the most recent 3D trajectory modeling project in the Plaza.

That is only a partial list of presenters and speakers,  as for myself, I will be presenting my ongoing research (and hopefully my partner David Boylan will be able to join me) on the "Wheaton names". 

I hope that all sounds interesting, I'll be posting more as we move towards December.  Certainly I'd urge everyone interested in any of the political assassinations to join us, we go to great lengths to make the speakers accessible to the audience and they are always very cooperative in that.

Registration and conference hotel rates are both available now at this link:

http://jfklancer.com/Dallas2018/index.html

Stu has made contact with Ehling who is cooperative but says his talks with Wheaton were far ranging and barely touched on JFK.  He is helping Stu as much as possible with what he does have and we will just have to see if anything new falls out.   At this point I can say that David Boylan and I are working on the Wheaton/Jenkins/Quintero story and have learned a great deal more about the backstory for them.  However we have to face the fact that what was going on was Wheaton simply hearing conversations between Jenkins and Quintero with people they were working with on Contra activities at the time  - who in turn were discussing the JFK attack in terms of yet other people commonly known to all of them who had talked about it over the years. Backtracking that sort of thing is probably a "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" exercise...in other words a perfect fit (for me at least)...grin. 

Stu and I have been corresponding with Bill and Stu is on it...

Thanks David,  he certainly did contact various agencies in later years ...the question is whether we can find anything specific about his connections and activities in 1963....he certainly did know a lot of people, especially since the took the position of intelligence chief for the reformed exile Brigade that year after coming out of Cuba, which certainly meant learning a lot about the whole anti-Castro and exile community. That was made a lot easier given his brothers well established connections running a detective agency in Miami.

Jim, I don't  have a copy of Fonzi's book available - deeply stored.  I spent a lot of time on Werbell's history myself I didn't see him with De Torres during that time nor doing "wet affairs" although Werbell was one of the biggest talkers in the world, wildly exaggerating his contacts and activities for self promotion.  My sources on De Torres are all direct from photos as in the Baku incident, from photo collections as with Hargraves and Seymour or on the sorts of documents David has been posting here.  Gayton and I discussed a lot of things but I wouldn't pretend to recall specifics on talking about De Torres.  If someone can find some primary sources on De Torres beyond Werbell or if you could give me Fonzi's source  I would love to see it. 

I need to add that personally I consider Fonzi's Otero source key,  De Torres as a primary suspect in the Dallas attack and heavily involved in frustrating later investigations.  Its just very important to trace exactly what individuals he was associating with during the summer of 63 (after just being released from prison in Cuba the previous winter), who actually involved him in new anti-Castro missions and then in the JFK conspiracy.

De Torres came out with other Brigade prisoners at the end of 1962 and joined his brother's detective agency in Miami.  He was very active with the newly reformed Brigade in Miami but I found no documents showing that he was directly involved with the CIA at that point in time. The people he was personally involved with during the summer of 1963, as shown in pictures, were Roy Hargraves and William Seymour as well as a very important Commandos L independent boat mission against Cuba.  It was later that he went to work for Werbell. 

Michael,  I can only address the Veciana element of you question.  For that I think it is important to differentiate Vecian's first activities in Cuba vs what shows up in his recent book, which is far more dramatic and something that John has deconstructed  - he did so at length in his Lancer presentation last fall.  However we do know - the documents exist - that Veciana used some channel to contact the US about an attack on Castro and for that matter a group did stage just such an attack.  We also know that Phillips himself wrote about going under cover and using a disguise and an alias to work with underground groups inside Cuba including one which was planning an attack on Cuba.  So - is it possible that there was a limited contact between the two in Cuba and that Veciana was at least known to Phillips. Personally I think that is very possible.

The more important part, and the part I understand John is working on now, relates to what happened with Veciana after he came out and how Alpha 66 was started and influenced. We will have to see on that but certainly it still seems viable that Phillips contacted Veciana after his arrival in the U.S, as Veciana says he did, and that Phillips might have helped kick off a covert and possibly not even fully understood level of support for Alpha 66.  Certainly someone did arrange for a level of media visibility for them that was pretty unique at the time - and that documents suggest the CIA later regretted.

We are learning more about the means by which the CIA, or possibly not the CIA at HQ level, but sympathetic CIA officers, managed to support certain exile group missions...even through simple matters such as telling where caches of arms or equipment had been deposited for sanctioned operations....enabling them be picked up by non-sanctioned operators. I think its a little early to claim that we understand all that was happening around Veciana...no doubt John will tells us more through.

If anyone has Shadow Warfare you will find a good bit of Conein's SE Asian activities in it and there are lots of records about his actual day to day activities in the fall of 1963 available in documents given that he was very much involved with the Diem coup....and people in DC were extremely interested in how that had come out so badly.  I found dozens of documents relating to his failed attempts to find an aircraft to fly them out during the coup...so there's lots of material to work from if you go that route.

I'd suggest you look at the ARRB documents on the 112th, they will give you a great more detail on the unit and on Col. Jones...as I've said before, much of that is on the research CD I did for Lancer...don't know if anyone ever ordered that and studied it or not?  There are likely more documents available today, I know Malcolm Blunt found some, don't know if they made it onto the MFF or not.

Off the top of my head I don't think he brought up any of the Army contacts with he or Alpha 66.  But as  you say, that really wasn't were Fonzi was looking at the time; he was looking into the Miami community and towards Cubans and the CIA. 

I probably need to reread SWHT myself, every time I got into it to respond to a question or check a new document I find something I had forgotten about...then again I wrote it largely as a research resource, good thing.

The mob connections in Ultimate Sacrifice are to Marcello, Giancana and Trafficante...primarily Marcello and New Orleans.  Waldron does not really pursue the Roselli/LA or Roselli/ Lansky connections - the LA connections may have been far more important to Dallas given the contacts from LA to Ruby immediately before and after the assassination.

And for what its worth Roselli had no OSS connection, his WWII service was basic and limited as was his military training.  His connection to the CIA was first two the Castro poison plots and then to Harvey and the second phase of assassination attempts.

https://www.amazon.com/All-American-Mafioso-Johnny-Rosseli-ebook/dp/B00LSWEDJ8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531168282&sr=1-1&keywords=rappleye+and+becker

Strange, no remark about the AMOTS  were actually trained and deployed for in regard to the Cuban invasion...and "provided information" is a very genteel expression.  Also no word about their activities in Mexico City...

Steve, I think that CI did indeed increasingly become a driver, the word has always been that both Security and CI had to vet all operations personnel and missions. A good example is the fact that Angleton was called in post BOP and worked with the Cuban exiles as part of a project to deal with Cuban intel penetration of the overall Cuba project...which had leaked like a sieve.  That put him into contact with both Morales and the AMOTS at that point.   Angleton had his fingers all over the place and was an intrusive force..greatly complicating individual station operations at points. 

I certainly suspect there were some side deals going on in MC and around Lee Oswald in the fall of 63 and Simpich has done a great job opening  up those possibilities.  Its good odds that some of the apparent confusion we see in MC relates to such side deals as well as in Phillips own trip back to DC while Oswald was in MC.

And yes, I would surely put that on the wish list although the odds are slightly less than seeing Santa when leaving cookies out at Christmas.

Wow, that is a great find David, especially with the suggestion that the station inquiry was a major priority (not something limited strictly to a tasking by Sforza) and went on well into 1964; it certainly gives lie to Shackley's later remarks...

I find it hard to think that a COS could order an inquiry of that nature without HQ authorization nor that it could be conducted without a report to HQ...and as far as I know no sign of any such report, specifically including a detailed inquiry into the exile community, has ever surfaced in any form.  That should certainly be a high priority item for future document searches but I would have to think its either something that never went into the files.  If Shackley did it strictly on his own authority, and lied about it later, it would suggest that something really serious turned up in the station inquiry.

Steve, the answer would be "no" in terms of official chain of command - on the organization chart and in terms of who filled out his personnel reviews.  However Phillips often wore a couple of hats and due to the success of the Guatemala operation was seen as sort of a psyops guru, providing consulting on projects outside his normal tasking including projects out of HQ. 

To make it more complex, in Mexico City he performed a Counter Intelligence role, organized psyops against various targets and by the fall of 63 had a new job working for the new Cuba project head at HQ all the while doing certain tasks relating to the new AM/WORLD project and even working high profile exfiltrations from Cuba with Morales at JM/WAVE (Castro's sister being one, worked by Sforza, Morales and Phillips).  He was very much in a job transition at that point in time.

By the fall of 63 he had his fingers in a great many pies and so did James Angleton who was waging a turf war at HQ claiming he should be in charge of CIA both in Mexico City and Saigon. There is some reason, Bill Simpich pursues this line of thought and I address it in NEXUS, to think that Angleton and Phillips might have been working certain special projects that fall, perhaps without the full knowledge of the COS. Its interesting that both Phillips and Angleton's person in MC both got relatively poor reviews from the COS that year, possibly because of unhappiness over Phillips divided loyalties. 

See, now wasn't that simple...not...grin,  Larry

Thanks for posting that source David; much better than my general memory of it.  

In reading that we should remember that Shackley himself later testified that his station, JM/WAVE had conducted no JFK assassination inquiries since that work had been assigned to the Warren Commission and the FBI.   Yeah, right.

I think its a very important take away to differentiate individuals from groups in regard to their "effectiveness" and the possibility that certain individuals would be stand outs for violent action, with respectable track records for carrying off missions.  Generally speaking JM/WAVE itself had a pretty poor record of attacks inside Cuba even though it had very experienced CIA  paramilitary officers like Jenkins and Robertson organizing missions. In comparison Alpha 66 leaders like Cuesta, Commands L teams including Bernardo de Torres and even independents like Roy Hargraves carried out successful missions against Cuban installations and ships. Certain CIA associated Cuban exiles were also imminently successful in independent, covert operations - Felix Rodriquez being a stand out. You find people like that moving from group to group, not only from the Cuban brigade onward but through the 60's and on into anti-Communist missions from the Congo, to Vietnam and on to Nicaragua.

Its also worth mentioning that when the mysterious internal JM/WAVE investigation (ordered by Sforza) was ordered to look into Cuban exiles who might have been involved in the assassination, it not only addressed CIA associated exiles but all sorts of independents as well (before  you asked, we know the inquiry was done, we even know a few of the questions asked, we have that anecdotally from someone at JM/WAVE but that's all we have - whatever information was collected either didn't actually make it into a report or was quickly suppressed).

It occurred to me I should add something to this post and that relates to the fact that the CIA, at least JM/WAVE, may have on occasion provided unspecified levels of support to unsanctioned groups like Alpha 66 and Commandos L in a "factually" deniable fashion - deniable to the point the groups themselves would be unable to provide evidence to claim CIA support, even if for some reason they wished to do so. I cover this on page 357 of SWHT 2010 in reference to a CIA memo discussing support for both Alpha 66 and Commandos L. The discussion pertains to using a particular asset who is reporting in advance on missions by those groups and the fact that he would not be useful for that particular function.

I'm working in this area now and a general observation would be that during 1963 Alpha 66 became more politically active in exile organizing and fund raising but several of its more combat and mission active members moved to join Commandos L. Commandos L gained considerable media attention for its missions and continued a focus on Russian targets:

 http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/belligerence/norman-key.htm

There are a couple of LI crypts still in review but I'm afraid I don't find any on these...

Paul,  I think Ron quoted me earlier on this,  "By January of 1962, U.S. Army counter-intelligence had been established on Alpha 66 members, and contacts were made throughout 1963.  In particular, Army counter-intelligence (CI) had made contact with Antonio Veciana in October 1962.  He was assigned code number DUP 748 on January 30, 1063."

Army Counter Intelligence definitely had an interest in both Alpha 66 and Veciana but from the documents posted above it appears other Army functions were copied on the CI contacts and may have had their own interests - including collecting samples of Soviet weapons.  You would have to run through all the new documents being posted by Michael and David for a full list of Army units who were following the contacts or who had an interest.  I have not done that, I'm off chasing some  names and connections David pointed out -

You raise and interesting question B.A.  Actually we have had at least some documents outlining the contacts by the Army with Alpha 66, their direct contacts with Veciana and their designation of him as an informant for Army intelligence for a relatively long time.  I had some of those documents as long ago as 2005 when I was working on the first edition of SWHT.   My memory is far from perfect but I don't recall Veciana talking to Fonzi about the Army contacts and the Army interest in Alpha 66.  I wonder if Veciana discussed it in his recently published autobiography - where he presents a greatly expanded role with the CIA inside Cuba.

For those more current with those books, does this sort of Army connection - on them?  And does Veciana significantly expand on the sorts of activities with Alpha 66 that are described in these new documents?

Looks like a crypt for an individual not a project or group

I think it would have to be someone the CIA would trust as a source and also someone deep enough with the plotters to be trusted as a CIA contact...