Larry Hancock

OK, since I have mentioned this so many times, here it is - the Keys to Conspiracy includes documents on Nagell, Martino, Hemming/Sturgis, and the 112th/Prouty. You can order it through through the page shopping cart on the following link: http://jfklancer.com/catalog/CDrom.html I won't belabor it any further...I'll leave it up to anyone reading the material to come up with their own appropriate name for the roles Hemming and Sturgis were filling...

As much as I want to stay out of this, for those who have not already made up their minds I need to say that key records on Sturgis have been available for some time. The same can be said for Hemming (who was also cleared as a CIA source for a short period after he came out of Cuba, until he violated some basic security protocols). For those who don't know, Hemming was continually volunteering information to the FBI and the CIA, as were Hargraves and Howard. Generally on other groups or people they were competing with for donations or publicity . I dug into this about a decade ago and got the files on Sturgis which show exactly how he became involved in Cuba, his involvement in buying and smuggling in weapons - much like McKeown. After he came out he appears to have been paid with unofficially with discretionary funds (most likely by Hunt) to do wild things like the leaflet and bombing runs over Havana (they even helped his buddy the former Cuban Air Force chief Diaz Lantz acquire the surplus plane to do that) and how eventually he was brought on as a "source" informing generally on any and all exile Cuban activities. I should also note that the documents show that before coming out he volunteered to put together an assassination of Castro, the offer got to the CIA and they rejected it. Hemming called Sturgis a snitch and eventually he was, his information shows up in JM/WAVE station reports. Again, it appears he was paid for that with discretionary funds, was certainly not an officer and most likely not on any formal payroll (as Cuban exile assets were). Hunt and Barker held the money bag and Barker in particular was doing a good deal of private stuff on the side, some of it apparently illegal and that got him dismissed. I put all this in the Keys to Conspiracy CD which will indeed be available shortly from Lancer, they just burned new copies. Anyone interested can email me and I'll let you know when and how you can order it.

Yeah, and Marita was out in the Everglades doing military training with the Cuban exile guys....which apparently didn't take since by 1963 she was making Miami newspaper headlines because of her paternity suit against a Latin American dictator in exile....suggest enabling sanity check...

I'll be interested to see what documents John has turned up that show ZR/RIFLE specifically associated with Lumumba and Trujillo. Has anyone dug into Countdown to Darkness on that subject...I just have not had time yet.

Probably so Pat, others are following it much more closely than I am able to...however my point is the same in that it will tend to minimize media attention if its spread out. Of course these days I'm not sure there is any bandwidth left for anything outside the White House.

Well I can say that in years past I have paid money for similar or worse copies, sometimes several duplicates in the same batch and in regard to FBI reports in particular often getting three pages and four times that many which were duplicates. This looks no different from a good percentage of the trash I got over the years...

Jim should be commended for his detailed response, I second his evaluation.

Michael is concerned by a thread diversion here but I need to offer one more possibility.....this is just from memory but I think the two crop duster types attended the same meeting (DRE) that Oswald was reportedly sighted at. That never was confirmed but it would have been SOP for the FBI to be monitoring such meetings and if they were aware of both Oswald and had the crop duster pilots as suspected infiltrators it could well explain Hosty's comments. Again, just from memory but worth pondering.

Well I was being a bit coy Steve, actually I think there is a reasonable chance that Odio was being monitored and I would not be terribly surprised if Oswald had been either asking about her or in contact with her or for that matter if the "visit" was a diversion after the fact. Problem is I just see no way to know for sure. However, since we know that residents of the Harlandale house were being investigated and that the FBI even had an informant in that group, I think chances are probably best in that direction as far as what Hosty was talking about - I especially feel that way since we got a photo of Masen and I don't see the faintest resemblance to Oswald. I just don't know what made Dick Russell even think that. My bet is that Oswald was a visitor and that he was described in a surveillance report...

Steve, I think that is the only documentation we have on that, only Patterson's story of the remarks by Hosty - clearly it made a strong impression on him. Can't say that is surprising. As to subversives vs. subversive agents, I can say that Heitman was in the midst of an investigation of an individual living at the House on Harlandale who was suspected of being a Castro agent so that might qualify. If Oswald was there that would give you one suspect. I gather from the research I've done that there were suspicions Alpha 66 and DRE were being penetrated by other agents so that could explain a second suspect. Another option is that the FBI was tasked with breaking up any weapons buys, especially those associated with weapons to be used in attacks on Cuba - Oswald crossing paths with anyone buying weapons might have been thought of in the context of subversive agents - and we know there were folks in Dallas and folks in Dallas from Miami all looking for weapons. The thing is this sounds pretty personal, not like Oswald was in some larger meeting with suspects but actually had personal contact. We could get wild and crazy and say was Sylvia Odio and her little sister who was going to college and hanging with some known radical DRE types who were hunting weapons...but I'm not ready to go there yet. I don't think Oswald contact two FBI agents handling subversive tasks would classify as Top Secret - unless it revealed Oswald was an active FBI informant. I can only repeat what I said before, the remarks by Patterson were something that Hosty totally refused to discuss with me, otherwise he was very open and even discussed some pretty strong assertions such as Oswald being under FBI surveillance in MC. He was very much a gentleman about it all though, and was well received when he agreed to speak at the Lancer conference one year.

Jim, the book reference I gave you was from a summary discussion, I'll look for the actual report citation when I have more time. As to the subversive file, beats me, either classified or destroyed....would you really expect it to ever see the light of day? I asked Hosty about this exchange myself and showed him a Patterson document ...he had been very cooperative on all my other questions but simply declined to comment about this. I've written and blogged about this many times previously but I certainly can carry it no further than Patterson's remarks. I'm thinking of wrapping all this up for a Lancer conference presentation, but that's a couple of months off. It won't be until then that I dig back into it including document citations.

It was the conversation with the Secret Service agent William Patterson (who was first to interview Marina Oswald later) Sat morning at police headquarters in which Hosty told him Oswald had been seen two weeks before with known subversives and that a classified security report had been filed. Hosty expressed a belief that the classified file would be handed over but it never was. Paterson was not interviewed by the WC. Patterson prepared an SS memo on the conversation but was never questioned further about it. (see SWHT 2020 p198 - 199) The exchange with Revill was another, separate incident and would seem to confirm that at point in time Hosty was very well aware of a subversive file related to Oswald and assumed it would become part of the investigation.

I suspect that Jim is on the money here....the Administration could care less about something like this....heck, the majority of its appointments have still not been made....this is just to move it out at a time when the news is subsumed in Trump, Health Care etc knowing that nothing else is getting media attention now. After all, once NARA has it ready, why hold it for some event to focus attention on it....this makes it look like its no big deal at all.

Mark, I definitely agree, personally I think this is just a part of a much larger FBI subversive operation that targeted Marina and Lee but also had extended the surveillance to other places where Lee simply have showed up, including the House on Harlandale. They had informants there before his arrival. Its stuff Hosty would not necessarily have been involved in and some of it directed against the exile community and gun running was in play well before he showed up in Dallas that fall. There are inconsistencies all over the place in regard to how the FBI handled Oswald that would be explained if indeed there was a serious subversive investigation in place that had to be "disconnected" and removed from sight afterwards. The real slip was that Hosty would have heard about it and revealed it to the SS agent Sat. morning, that was his really big blunder but of course there was no reason he should not have told the truth at that time....

Well we do know that postal employees were used as covers for mail opening, described as informants instead. You may be right, using the officer could have been simply a diversion, apparently it worked since no questions were asked...a disgrace indeed.

Performing an illegal wire tap at an office, home, motel room is one thing but if you want to install one on the line inside a Bell Tel Central Office - as this apparently was - you are going to need some legal clout. Easy enough for the FBI but even back then somebody did not just walk in and connect a tape recorder to a line distribution frame.

We have a number of incidents in which mail openings and telephone taps appear to have been designated as "informants" and given a T designation, it served as a nice disguise for those practices....especially if they were ongoing over a period of time. Ron, as to your comment about a Dallas- centric conspiracy, there were a lot of things going on in Dallas and that was where the attack was set up so of course you will find tactical associations. That does not mean the conspiracy started there or was driven from there. And on the House on Harlandale, I write about it extensively in SWHT, not a new thing at all and neither are the weapons buying practices the FBI was intensely investigating. When Oswald ended up in Dallas he was in the middle of a number of ongoing investigations including weapons trafficing, arms thefts from the Terrell armory, the Mason sting - and he should have been on the FBI's subversive list since he was still being investigated as the head of an FPCC cell in NO. Its certainly not unreasonable to think he was being monitored and even under surveillance by the FBI at many points.

Michael, I think we can do a lot better than that and it would actually take us somewhere. If you step back a bit from this and look at the bigger picture the tap (phone monitoring, which appears to have been put in place at the local CO and would likely have involved a recorder unless you have agents there taking short hand when a call happens to come through) - then factor in Ron's point about the timing, you have the suggestion of an FBI instigated wire tap on the Paines (obviously not a local police thing and most likely justified as part of an FBI subversive investigation of Lee and possibly Marina, who would have been a legitimate target as much as Lee). Hosty wrote that he had considered Marina more of a subversive target than Lee. More importantly he told a Secret Service agent on the morning after the assassination that Lee had been observed meeting with subversives and those files would certainly be provided to the SS - it appears they never were. I and others have been following investigations by SA Heitman and I will be summing up that work in a bit. We have documents showing that he had been involved with a national level FBI subversive investigation of a possible Cuban G2 infiltrator, who lived at the House on Harlandale. We know from records that the FBI had informants inside that house (as unreliable as they might be) and there is a very good likelihood the house was under physical surveillance. We also know that the rest of Heitman's subversive files have been repeatedly denied to us in the face of FOIA requests. My guess is that you don't have to wonder all over the place looking for why that phone was tapped and it has everything to do with both Lee and Marina and it was not brand new that afternoon.

As Michael has pointed out, there are many "telephony" ways to do this, some quite simple. You can use a butt in set to just listen and do it at any cross connect point on the cable that serves them. If you actually want to put a recorder on the line to capture a full record of all voice calls over a period of time the FBI would have either gone to the telephone company and put a tap and recorder on at the local tel exchange office. Of course you could go all out, run a line tap on the cable and take it into a rental house, a van, etc but that's more CIA/overseas stuff where you cannot just legally go to the telephone company and get cooperation. I see no reason why entering the house to place a tap of any sort would be necessary, that's more for placing wireless/radio bugs.

I've seen nothing that would confirm that...and much to suggest otherwise, especially since in March 1961 both men would have been deeply involved with matters pertaining to the pending Cuba project which came to fruition with the landings in April. Given that it was Roselli who had helped put the logistics in place to poison Castro before the landings and since it was Hunt's last minute operational stupidity that broke the delivery chain for the poison you would suspect the two men were not coordinating their activities...much less traveling together.

Following the visit to Weitzman, other researchers interviewed his doctors at the rest home and the Doctors described the fact that Weitzman was highly nervous and hesitant to talk to people and would pretty much say whatever was necessary to make them go away. I know I'm always a wet blanket but we really need to be cautious and apply some of the best practices when looking into interviews well after the fact. There is a huge body of research which illustrates the cautions over even basic memories from witnesses days after an event, much less months or years.

Close, but the document I was referring to is his voluntary Prouty interview with the ARRB, quite an extensive one which addresses a number of his articles and actual knowledge relating to the Dallas trip and protection. There were also a number of ancillary internal ARRB memos about his statements and related inquires into the 112th. Unfortunately I can't find it on the MFF at present and Rex is on vacation so he can't check right now. I obtained the documents myself directly from NARA and provided them to JFK Lancer, they scanned them and made them available on a CD titled Keys to the Conspiracy. It is offered by Lancer but Ron tells me he checked and the link on their site is to my book not the CD. I will take it up with the folks at Lancer and try to straighten out the availability and also see if we can get the interview document on MFF. I had assumed it was there by now but Rex bashed me about the head once again for thinking every single document was on MFF so it may not be.....yet. Sorry for the confusion, but it is something everyone following this thread should have a chance to see, looks like that is just not as easy as I thought it would be...darn.

Going to say this just one more time; locate and read Prouty's extended interview with the ARRB in terms of his remarks about Dallas, about the "stand down" and other related topics. It will give you the needed context to evaluate this aspect of the tramps discussion.

That's not quite the way it happened. Bowers was never given a clearance to allow trains to move through the yards; he simply did so on his own authority in about that time frame. At that point in time a train coming from downtown Dallas (to the East) passed through the yard headed out across the railroad bridge and as it passed beneath him he looked down and saw a single individual in an open hopper car. He stopped that train and reported the individual to police. This is all time stamped on the police radio log. We have no comment from Bowers himself about any further activity, apparently he didn't think it noteworthy enough to mention in his interview. Separately other tramps were taken into custody and three were walked down in front of the TSBD while being taken into custody. You find mention of other tramps being taken in during the search in the police call log. Nothing at all records three men being found in a rail car; only Bowers report of one man in a hopper. Check out the call log for details.

I can't tell you about that specifically Paul but I can say that Harvey actually asked for guidance from the CIA office of security ...which had FBI connections....for directions to known safecrackers, burglars and smugglers in Europe before he made his recruiting trip for ZRRIFLE. He was looking for assets to break into and steal code books from foreign residencies as well as for strong arm action against couriers etc. I could recommend several good and more contemporary books that deal with Odessa and former NAZI, mostly SS, smuggling networks but I don't see any immediate connection. I will say there has been a huge amount of good work on that in recent years and it nails down most of the real details on those post war smuggling networks (both people and money). Hecksher is another story entirely, I would recommend Dick Russell's most recent JFK book for details on Hecksher's background ...beyond what is in SWHT.