Larry Hancock

Mark, I'm afraid that's exactly the type of grunt work its going to take. We have to find out what documents that were on the list to be released actually were for one thing. That should allow us to find the sweet spots. Then we can at least make some sort of judgement on the nature of what is being withheld. My understanding is that the law will require NARA to list that out at some point but its possible the WH may string this out so long that we have to do our own list.

George, the reason I called it second hand was that the sources did not see him in Dallas nor see him boarding a plane to Dallas. I can't claim exact memory of the conversation but I recall checking and finding that there were no directly flights to Dallas out of Rome at that point in time (the aircraft did not have sufficient range) and it would have to have been a connecting flight through NYC. It was also odd to me that Harvey would actually say he was on a flight to the city where the President would be assassinated? And if I recall the person speaking to Talbot was describing a conversation with the Harvey's assistant, he had not been there to hear Harvey say anything himself. Which is why I said second or third hand...but admittedly it was from memory. At the time I really wanted it to be true since I have Harvey as the person who essentially incited the plot...but I could not get comfortable enough with the story to go with it as fact.

I just listened to commentary on CNN and I swear the "new" documents being described related to documents released years ago; I wonder if they cannot tell the difference between actual new documents and redaction removal?

The President is the only one empowered to make that decision as per the JFK records act. And today somebody showed him a list and asked if he wanted to take the personal responsibility for any damage or embarrassment - and he bailed. That simple. But beyond that somebody certainly got their tail burned for allowing him to approve the earlier WH release - his CIA director, if he were competent which is is not - should have been all over this and minimized the embarrassment.

George, unfortunately the sources for that travel story are second and third hand at best...although I would love to see it confirmed. I made a case for Harvey actually being the driving force behind the plot in NEXUS. As to money, no need for any special money, any that was needed for the tactical team and Dallas was readily available from the Castro assassination project which Harvey oversaw and which Morales and Robertson supported operationally. On a side note, we know so much about Harvey and his career at this point in time, including actually having copies of documents he took home after his departing the CIA that if the records release is indeed withholding Harvey documents I consider it a smoking gun as to something that would indeed be at least suspicious about Harvey in regard to the assassination.

Hi B.A., of course this is off the top of my head (memory disclaimer enabled) but its safe to say at that point in time Bush was moving aggressively into Texas politics and developed a reputation for taking no prisoners. My guess is that he simply decided to make trouble for someone in his local party politics who was causing him grief - probably without thinking too much about it at the time. Not to be rude but the Bush family did not run to deep thinking.. He may not have realized it would accomplish much more than harassment, and for that matter it really didn't. My thinking is twofold a) Bush had no experience which would have led to any sort of direct involvement in the attack or need to be in Dallas as part of it, b} he was identifiable and nobody in their right mind would put him on the scene of the attack and c) he has been proven to be a CIA commercial/business asset, yet another reason to have him far away if he was in any way complicit. All I can say is after having spent a great deal of time examining exactly how CIA officers actually went about organizing and directing real assassinations, nothing about having Bush involved makes any sense to me and no tactical person would in any way be taking orders from him.

Of course they prepared objections and postponement/redaction requests. No doubt NARA knew that, hence there comments on "flux". On the other hand I suspect the White House and certainly the President has no clue to how such things work and that Trump will have to respond to each of those requests - I would be amazed if the WH had known enough to ask for a list.

Good point, most likely they never included that image among the documents turned over to the JFK collection...there is such a thing as "too much information"...

Steve, unless you can get back as far as Egypt and the pyramids I don't think you are making a serious effort at this...grin

From a military command and control perspective that answer was exactly correct, with JFK out of the command loop McNamara represented the sole remaining person to exercise National Command Authority and the Joint Chiefs had the responsibility to communicate emergency orders to the military from him though the National Military Command/Communications Center at the Pentagon. With JFKs death Johnson would have moved into the NCA position, interestingly there is no indication that he understood that or was told that by his aides. He certainly showed no sign of moving into the role.

David, its pure speculation but its hard for me to think this sort of set up along with photos was done before the assassination. I wonder if this is one of the several official interviews Marina was given afterwards. Those were recorded and there are transcripts.

Thanks David, although I remembed some of the remarks in those documents from long ago I did not recall the source. Much appreciated....now is it me or are the remarks in the FBI documents a lot milder than what shows up in his recent writing? Certainly the FBI always interviews with a checklist of certain types of questions but I don't see any of the rather strong observations about Oswald's temper, emotions, etc in those interviews, especially in the summary.

I'm curious as to whether this fellow was ever interviewed by the FBI, the WC, the HSCA or whether any of these types of insights on Oswald were offered then...rather than over 50 years later? He certainly seems like the sort of person the FBI should have located an his thoughts would certainly have been eagerly accepted in regards to motive.

OK, a little more detail....I worked with communications in the service....crypto guys were specialists in the machines themselves, mostly repairing and operations, it was a classified area, you did not even get into training without a TS. The machines did the coding and decoding and then you had cleared code clerks who simply handled, filed and circulated the message traffic. None of this has to do with signals intercept work which in Europe was done at two Air Force bases, one in Scotland and one in England. Those crypto machines were not all over the place, normally only in headquarters, since they were obviously high security. For what its worth, and strictly as third hand information, people who have talked with Dinkins relatives say that the only thing he talked about later were newspaper articles and his personal information only had collections of newspaper articles. Take that for what its worth.

Once again I just ask for someone to show me some sort of proof that Dinkin was a crypto code operator - for the Army - and that his job in 1963 involved that sort of work, that also means showing what unit he was in and that it was tasked with secure communications. Of course it could be all about reading newspapers and interpreting articles.

Loli, I suggest you start with The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford, afterwards Shadow Warfare (by myself) will give you a number of good leads and sources as to CIA political warfare in South America...you should also try the studies on that available at the National Security Archives (a web search will quickly find that for you). One of the important things to keep in mind is that David Phillips, the CIA's master psychological warfare specialist became the CIA Chief of Western Hemisphere during the 1970s and would have driven any projects directed towards media manipulation. Normally such programs would have been conducted by political action officers operating out of the American foreign diplomatic missions so you might also want to check the FRUS state department releases for the nations and time periods for the countries you are focused on; there is an immense amount of information there and it is now publicly available.

Steve, Stu and I explore Milteer in a fair amount of detail in the Awful Grace of God and we did also go though all his FBI records and dig into Christianson's primary research on him. In addition we managed to get information on him that the HSCA collected but not take into their DC files, its still in a country court house in Georgia - to your question, no he did not serve in the military and he no military connections, he had a common law wife, traveled the country extensively in ultra right political circles, did some minor weapon sales, had a fake bank account in Idaho for that (or Utah, have to look that up), inherited some family money but not too much and in general was a right wing political gadfly covering angles from the NSRP to a number of KKK groups. His most important connections may have been to the money collection that went into the King bounty out of Atlanta.

For those interested, we now have the detailed JFK Lancer conference schedule with speaker times posted at the link below. Also, we are happy that Jim Jenkins will be joining us to participate in a session with Mike Chesser which discusses a new examination of the X ray materials from Bethesda. http://jfklancer.com/Dallas2017/2017welcome.html#schedule

And once again, rather than leaving it strictly to McAdams I would offer my extensive Nagell research and analysis with a large quantity of related documents (many of which you will not find elsewhere) available on CD from JFK Lancer: http://jfklancer.com/catalog/CDrom.html I'd love to see somebody actually study it and engage in a dialog - I can assure you it will give you a more comprehensive exploration than what you see from McAdam's.

Its a good idea to read Russell on this.....the actual point that I recall was that the Soviets thought Oswald to be a loose cannon, while affiliating himself with Russia he could do any of a number of things that would embarrass them, including violence. I don't think there was any mention of his specifically being a potential JFK assassin. At the same time the Russians advised Nagell that there were Cuban exiles that definitely did want to attack JFK and that they bore watching... This is just from memory but TMWKTM is a big book and it would be good for anyone in this discussion to go back to it for the exact details.

Paul, the best I can do is to give you my opinion that the exiles involved in the tactical team were told that a. JFK had to be eliminated ASAP to kill the backchannel talks with Castro that were about to get underway and might have well booted the Russians out of Cuba, removed the trade embargo and restored Cuba to essentially a socialist state of neutrality like India (JFK was the only US leader of the era who understood and could accept anti-colonial positions of neutrality) and b. they were fed a line about a patsy being in place and other plans in progress for the assassination to trigger an attack on Cuba. Some of that may well have been true and aborted with Oswald's unplanned capture - I've commented on that before - or it may all have been a line of BS fed to them, not that unusual since promises were often made to surrogates (sometimes the CIA officers themselves believed them). I can tell you that Martino among others in later years made remarks indicating he felt that they might well have been manipulated.

Michael, if you take a close look at my post you will not see any discussion of "big plans"....as to "getting out of hand", the history of the period is quite complex, with agendas and cliques changing almost month by month. I think I document those changes pretty well in both Someone Would Have Talked and NEXUS - you will certainly find more than rumor and innuendo there....and I'm pretty sure my friend Bill would agree that State Secret only tackles part of the larger context for what happened in Dallas.

We have the speaker list pretty well lined up at this time; the speakers and other details can be viewed at this link: http://jfklancer.com/Dallas2017/2017welcome.html

Ron, the best that I can offer is that as Nagell describes, as early as the winter of 63/63 there were exiles flaming mad at JFK over the missile crisis settlement and they began talking and even plotting an attack on him...maybe one small group, perhaps two or three small groups over time with some of the same members. First they tried the ex marine in LA and that didn't work, ultimately maneuvering Oswald towards DC, they got on the FBI radar as a threat, some went to Chicago and the FBI informed the SS and Bolden heard about that, ultimately some may or may not have been pulled into the Dallas plot which I think specifically grew out of Miami and was incited by CIA officers carrying word of the backchannel Castro talks. Does that make it "progressive", sort of, were they all independent actions, hard to know without being absolutely certain of the names of those involved in all of them. Dallas was the final action in a way, certainly JFK had been at risk virtually all year, increasingly so as time went on and later the Secret Service covered up that to a certain extent including destruction of files. Just my opinion, obviously.

I wonder if this suggests that Nagell was helping Oswald practice faking ID using both their cards?