Larry Hancock

Jim, for some factual context to the missions being referenced I suggest the following:

The Secret War Against Hanoi by Richard Schultz

The Way We Do Things, Black Entry Operations Into North Vietnam by Thomas Ahern

Black Ops, Vietnam; The Operational History of MCVSOG by Richard Gillespie

The are all factual and I used them all in researching and writing Shadow Warfare as well as covering the links between the DeSoto missions and the seaborne raids on N. Vietnam which are both related to the Tonkin Gulf incidents. They might help with your question - I certainly don't see where Nixon fits into it all.

There is indeed Chris...I bring that up in SWHT (see page 390/391) although its in a couple of places.  I'm not sure I would call them plots though.  There appear to have been at least two sanctioned military missions involving sniper attacks or some sort of ambush of Castro prior to the Bay of Pigs.  One apparently involved  Felix Rodriquez. Those were very serious operations and somebody went to a lot of effort to keep it covert. One of the things that makes Wheaton's story so important is that it was just the two people he mentions - Jenkins and Quintero - who had trained or been in training with some of the key suspects in the Dallas attack. And who were later involved in Contra activities.

When you put that together with RFK's call the afternoon of the assassination to Artime's people (Quintero was his second in command and Felix was on his team)  it continues to take you to the same set of individuals.

Its one of the few places where all the pieces can be proven to fit together.

Wheaton did not name the names he heard discussed as having been involved in Dallas.  He did name the individuals he was associated with at the time he heard the Dallas names in reminiscing sessions - that was Jenkins and Quintero, who he indeed was provably associated with at the time.  Wheaton was very firm about not doing anything beyond trying to get those two to offer statements to the government since they would have held the actual information and would have been able to substantiate it while he could not. 

Wheaton was indeed a source for Sheehan but things began to go off the rails shortly afterwards because he had been warned that he would be "poisoned" as  a credible source for trying to get the two on record and sure enough that smear campaign did occur.   If you have the 2010 version of SWHT this is all discussed in some length.  I also go into the overall Contra/drug smuggling thing is another kettle of fish entirely. .

Ooops...sorry, I used the admin link by mistake...try this:  https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/

Those familiar with Gene Wheaton's story, and others, may be interested in my current blog post on him, the vetting of him as a source and William Law's interview with him.  Its on my blog at https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/

Glenn, I don't consider it negative - just factual, they are still in the same place they were fifty years ago and the embargo still undermines one of the major strengths this nation has in foreign affairs, that of projecting its free economy and open culture. Its amazing that we continue to default on the leverage of our most fundamental assets as a nation. I don't think of it as negative or as a partisan stance, I just think of it as unproductive and frankly just sad....you can't reach people thorough closed doors.

I think that's right David and actually other than his original gambling wire job for the syndicate I don't know that he had much to do with it as an entity, he was working for individual guys - connected true, but on their individual projects not anything common.  His strongest connections were with investors on the east coast looking to move money west and launder it in legal investments and with Meyer Lansky who appears to have become his long time mentor.  His dealings with folks like Giancana were on individual projects and investments and of course in typical style how to leverage contacts and information.  Roselli was connected nationally and pretty politically savvy - including connections to DC lobbyists and influence peddlers such as Irving Davidson.

Of course before LA he had worked for godfathers including Capone in Chicago but in that regard he was a hired hand.

It was his relative independence, very unusual in those circles, which made him something special and gave him the power to do negotiations, otherwise he would always have been suspect.  In that regard he was something of a loner in one respect, holding himself apart - of course not from the ladies or the fleshpots of LA and Vegas.

OK David, its hard to compress a rather lengthy chapter into a few paragraphs but here  you go:

By the time Roselli arrived in Los Angeles he was in transition from street hood to enforcer, moving out of the rackets per se into gambling and running protection for games in LA, most importantly the high dollar off shore gambling ships. At that point he took his first syndicate job, putting a major racetrack gambling wire into operation. That gave put him in touch with a number of east coast mob money guys and brought him to the attention of Meyer Lansky, who became his real behind the scenes mentor.  Lansky was so impressed with Roselli he used him in Cuba to clean up some of the most egregious casino problems which were embarrassing the gambling industry there – Roselli had learned how to get people’s attention without leaving bodies strewn all over the place. For him it was about deals and deal making.

Back in LA, he used his east coast connections to bring big money into investments in the entertainment industry, a good way to launder cash – and he figured out ways to frustrate the movie industry unions while at the same time making money off the industry. The FBI was always frustrated by LA and Roselli; it was a city that used outside money to make more money rather than producing it through typical street crime (at least in his era).

With his entertainment connections, his money connections and his backing by Lansky, Roselli was in a great position to broker deals in gambling and entertainment as Vegas grew, his business card described him as a strategist and he helped folks like Giancana put casinos into Vegas. And he brokered his influence with entertainers and entertainment, Roselli made money off investment deals, and legal sidelines such as casino services. By the time you get to 1960 he had been gone from the street for a very long time, he knew people and he was trusted since he provided services and competed with none of the godfathers or with the syndicate. Was he a mob guy, sure, but a very different type of mob guy.

He was special in terms of the Castro plot because he had worked in Cuba, had connections to the old casino crowd there and also knew folks who still had channels into Cuba via the exile community in Florida – specifically Trafficante.  And up to that point in time he was known as the type of guy who could bring people together and ensure nobody talked. If the CIA was going to use criminal assets to operate inside Cuba, he was a great choice for making the right introductions that was his real attraction. That was really all there was to it, another agreement to make introductions, hook up people and get a deal done – which is really all he did for the CIA if you really dig into it.  It’s just that he did it twice, the second time for William Harvey – who clearly found him as a kindred spirit, Harvey always went full bore into anything he did, a really intense guy, and the same thing could be said for Roselli.  Roselli just dressed a lot better.  

Geno, honestly my notes and research on Vinson are far in the past and buried deeply.  Are they somewhere in file cabinets and stacks of appears in my garage, yes.  But I never wrote them up because I was never convinced it was worth it, like many of the others leads and sources I tossed after investigation.

As to the disconnects, I made (and still have in some notebook) copious notes of the interview that his lawyer showed at the Lancer conference.  It referred to people he had contacted by rank and name and included a particularly mysterious visit to a Congressman on an armed service committee who he claimed took a call while he was in his office and he overhead a discussion of warning JFK not to go to Dallas - yet another major coincidence.  Yet when his book came out I didn't see a discussion of what seemed to be a big deal in what I had seen in the video.  There were other more minor things but I did make up a list of them after book, sent them to his lawyer because Vinson asks for comment in the book - and could never get a response.  For someone to go that public and then write a book and refuse over a number of years to even discuss it or deal with contradictions and issues always makes me skeptical.

The issue of his SR-71 assignment is another story in itself but its well established that assignment to that project required special clearances and investigations from the military, the CIA and very possibly from the FBI.  I would have liked to discuss that with him but never got the chance..

I'll give that a shot later today, I'm afraid that is a very limited view of a man who sold his services to several major mob investment groups and godfathers as a strategic consultant - and they believed it.  If you have SWHT I try to do that in a chapter devoted to him, with a lot of input from my friend John Sanders who personally contacted some of the folks closest to him from both a personal and a business standpoint and consolidated a huge amount of FBI surveillance information on Roselli.  Back to this later...As to that Colonel stuff, about the only reason that would happen would be that Roselli carried that same personal aura of command and control that people like Morales did.  He was used to giving orders and having a lot of very tough street guys follow them, compliance had often gotten other people killed, non compliance ditto.  After a couple of decades of walking that path such folks project it pretty well.

Actually there might be Paul, since it appears to me that QJWIN was a crypt used in conjunction with more than one individual used by Harvey in a variety of operations - initially created to cover recruiting of overseas criminal assets for his Staff D activities but later expanded for a cover to use for executive action.  Others are still working this all out but it appears to me that the last person in that category was John Roselli; we can connect that to the expense reports relating to Harvey's trip to Miami ostensibly to close out that project - with Roselli being the individual in question who was essentially being taken off a Castro assassination project that had continued into 1963...we also have the sign off from Helms continuing that project post-Mongoose.   Given that Morales supported Harvey and the Castro assassination team from an operations and logistics support standpoint - as did Robertson apparently - then that could be a connection.  However there would be no connection to the initial individuals most frequently discussed in terms of QjWIN and overseas (Europe/Africa) operations.

Let me give the best profile of Morales that I can after all these years of investigating him.  Morales was essentially a military leader by nature, without much personal fear and quite combative, even in his high school years.  He was also highly loyal to those he consider close to him and you had to earn that.  In both ways he was very much like John Roselli or for that matter William Harvey which appears to be why those three - from very different backgrounds - managed to bonded in the anti Castro operations, it became very personal to all of them.

Professionally Morales was picked for the CIA as a paramilitary specialist and trainer, moved out of the Army and rising quickly through the ranks largely due to skill, motivation and management abilities - his performance as a trainer in the Guatemala project got him notice as did his organizational skills and the fact that he could communicate and write well and appears to have been a natural leader - in the form of a military DI or combat leader.  He was never a case officer, a political officer or anything of that sort in the CIA, his trade-craft was military oriented. If you read his memos you will be impressed by his organization, his ability to write and his concise reports - again in the military "good report" mode.  Which of course is why he became first a trainer on the Cuba project, then chief trainer and ops officer at JMWAVE, ultimately a CIA base commander at Pakse in Laos and a military trainer in Vietnam - eventually a consultant in paramilitary and counterinsurgency to the JCS.

This is a really smart man, virtually fearless and someone who was respected for his skills....Phillips called him the best back alley operator (which means dark project) he had ever met (Morales security tradecraft - aside from his drinking which only became a problem in later years - was impeccable, unlike most of the case or political officer types such as Hunt or Phillips who did not have his level of military discipline).   By 1963 Morales was assigned projects, gave orders and ensured that they were followed or somebody was in big trouble - reliable and reportedly very mean if crossed, loyal to a fault if you were good at your job, took orders and impressed him.

Morales was not a spy, not a case officer, not a CIA office type - he was a military leader brought in to train and run operations - at a management level above someone like Robertson or Jenkins because he was smarter and more educated and could be a manager at the level of something just short of a general officer, equivalent rank of Colonel.

  -- for what its worth,  Larry

You certainly don't have to make a point with me Pat, as I said in the beginning there are problems many of the items of evidence - and of course legally they were never challenged in Ray's initial trial, his lawyer just accepted them.  Very much the same as in the Sirhan trial.  When those initial legal hurdles don't come into play everything goes rapidly downhill from then on.

I don't think a name was given but you should check your copy of SWHT, (2010), if it was its in there - it might have been something like Hernandez, which shows up about as frequently as Smith used to. My recollection was that McKeown did not necessarily even know any true name; he had seen the man during the weapons deals and exchanges and those were done quickly and covertly.  But apparently at the time he did think it was someone he had seen during those dealings and it made him nervous - since he had been arrested, convicted and gotten a lot of visibility over it - given the strange nature of the request (one rifle, commonly available in the open market) he suspected it was some sort of set up.

And yes, to me it would seem to rule out Morales for that incident.

Pat, I'm afraid I'm way to distant from that to give you any thing off the top of my head...I'll drop a note to Stu and ask him. 

While the HSCA found and reported on some discrepancies, such as in the area of fingerprints, my impression was that many of their MLK (not JFK) primary documents were still withheld - per restrictions that Blakey had placed.

Just for reference, in a later discussion with Dick Russell, McKewon stated that he actually recognized the individual with Oswald and that was one of the things that made him cautious.  He recognized him as someone who had been a Castro supporter and someone he had seen during his time smuggling weapons into Castro's forces prior to the overthrow of Batista.

If true that suggests someone who had been a Castro supporter inside Cuba, who had turned on Castro and come out to the US - and by 1963 was in contact with Oswald fairly deeply.  All of which would match one of the two mysterious exiles reported in contact with Oswald in New Orleans, recruiting him for the operation in the DC area - corroborated by Oswald's letters about moving there - which aborted in September.

Micah, there are certainly open issues with the physical evidence, irrespective of the DOJ report.  Unfortunately they are just that and open means that its virtually impossible at this late date to resolve them one way or the other.  The one exception may have to do with unidentified fingerprints - or even the identified prints and even the HSCA inquiry found some serous problems there.  Stu Wexler and I summarized all this in our book The Awful Grace of God dealing with the King assassination - our research is ongoing as is our effort to have it officially reopened as a Cold Case. Stu is the real expert on the evidence and where the various items stand - certainly our view is that the open issues are just that and that they were not resolved in court or by the DOJ.  Along with that our view is certainly that there certainly others involved, not just Ray. 

OK, I'm going to do it again.....this has been discussed many times earlier here and in other venues.  I was there when Vinson's lawyer first presented his story at a Lancer conference - he showed up unannounced, asked for time and the only thing we could do was let him go on during the lunch break.  I listened, took copious notes, and tried to talk to him afterwards however he literally ran (well walked very quickly at least) out of the area, refusing to stay or take questions.  Over several  years I exchanged letters and made phone calls to him, trying to approach Vinson directly - which he never would allow.  I submitted a number of questions and issues which he also failed to address.  Ultimately when his book was published it asked readers to respond and I went back again with questions - and received no response. It should be noted that his lawyer has some pretty strong general conspiratorial views on his own, whether that influenced Vinson or not I can't say.

I researched Vinson's story in detail over some three years or more, as far as I could at least without more information than initially given in the video his lawyer showed or in the book - and there were some serious differences between the two.  Having been Air Force and traveled military air I knew there were some problems with his basic story but there were even larger issues including the fact that he clearly did not either recognize that the CIA and security contacts with him had to do with the fact that he was being vetted to work on the SR71 project, which he admittedly did do eventually.  What he makes out to be mysterious in that regard is really very much standard security practice for a joint AF/CIA project.

In terms of landing a four engine transport virtually in downtown Dallas, with nobody noticing or commenting on an afternoon when even the most minor anomalies were getting attention (like a single engine plane revving its engines at Red Bird, which produced multiple calls to newspapers) - that is extremely  unlikely.  Even more unlikely is any aircraft later landing at a SAC base at night, unchallenged - especially one of the few then housing both SAC bombers and Atlas ICBM's.

Take this for what its worth but I'm seeing a lot of these older stories resurfacing on the forum - yes they are mysterious and they are entertaining but don't think nobody ever looked into them...if they went nowhere there may be a good (non conspiratorial) reason. 

Michael, I think this is repeating myself but these days I'm never sure....the most likely reason for Hoover having a single share is that he was one of a number of well known state and national figures who received a single share as a promotional mailing - if you dig far enough on my blog you will find some great research by one of my readers discussing that mailing program, intended to promote new Colorado businesses...why was DUO filed as a business in Colorado, that frustrated us for quite a time until Alan Kent tracked them down.  My guess was that it was to keep it out of state to conceal some of the stock multiplication sales that were being carried out.  Its important to note that DUO itself didn't bring attention to itself in the promotional mailing, it was a Colorado promotion of business in the state.

Michael, you should be following my blog...  I've researched both the DalTex and Duo in great detail over the years and like many things from the earlier  years its not at all as mysterious as it was when I and others started the quest.  Its discussed in the 2010 version of Someone Would Have Talked and pretty well resolved in a series of blog posts from earlier this year. 

The short answer, which is really no fun at all, is that the stock most likely got to Hoover via a publicity stunt by a Colorado official promoting Colorado companies (which Duo was legally) by mailing single copies to a number of prominent people around the country.  It appears they may have picked Duo because of its exciting focus on both oil and uranium and because it had an exceptionally attractive stock certificate.  That in itself was most likely because the company itself was largely not much more than a stock scam - a huge amount of shares with no significant company assets, a couple of dry wells and no income - so it needed all the marketing clout it could get.

As with many of these old leads I was hoping for much more, it was a great mystery and sucked up immense amounts of time...sigh.

Always hate to disagree with Jim but I've dug deeply into it recently myself and there is a tremendous consistency in the Russian intelligence disclosures over some 40 years - not just in what was brought over from their side by their officers but in corroboration by FBI and CIA information essentially revealing the same practices from the other side. Of course everyone needs to make up their own minds of course and I always recommend primary research. However I find it entirely to easy to discount Russian covert action and political action practices based on a tendency to hold American and the West to higher standards or focus on their misdoings while giving the both the Soviets and Russians the benefit of the doubt. 

I find both equally culpable...but that's just me.

"1970 to 2016 46 years did Putin wake up the ghosts of 1970 and sprinkle them on 2016?

Putin was probably about 10 years of age in 1970. It would have been an old school KGB agent who informed Putin of their 1970 exploits.

I thought communism was thrown out the window after they called Reagan daddy. The old KGB agents are no more. Neither the new or the old KGB agents make the news in this day and age."

George, I'm afraid you just are not following the sources which focus a great deal of attention on the continuation of KGB practices through the SVB era post Cold War and into the FSB era which Putin has created. 

I would recommend "The New Nobility" by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan and "All The Kremlins Men" by Mikhail Zygar for some good insights on what's going on in Ruddia and the reach of those within its long established intelligence network.

Those "old" KGB practices remain alive and well and are being reinvigorated with new technology.  I'm blogging about them a great deal because there is such continuity and folks need to become aware of that. And nobody needed to "inform" Putin as he was an experience KGB officer himself. Its a new world, Communism may have faced away but when you get down to it Russian political action and covert warfare practices today look a lot like they did when the Czar's were involved in the Great Game with the British. Deniability, shaping the political battlefield, economic hegemony - new names, new faces, new technology - same old story. 

An oldie but goodine, we have actual KGN documents showing how hard they tried to push that scenario during the 1970's, leveraging it off Hunt and Watergate...its in the Mitrokhin archives. Putin seems to be increasingly channeling his KGB background.

David, I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm trying to work it backwards step by step.

1. The man wearing the clothes in the photo was not there that day so....so the photo was taken earlier.

2. The picture was taken earlier and if the man had been Oswald why would he just happen to have a photo taken much earlier (can we date that photo) with him in MC and not have taken it to the Consulate....makes little sense.

3. So....what Agency other than Oswald himself would have had a copy of that photo and how could they have gotten it.

4.  And the man in the Consulate had a variety of materials including FPCC correspondence and other correspondence that Oswald might have had copies of (why would he be keeping copies of his own correspondence, did he keep a scrapbook)?

5.  What Agency would have had copies of that material - the FBI comes to mind based on intercepts and their inside person at the FPCC but would the CIA have had the same sort of materials.

Just trying to flesh out how it would come down and who would be supporting the visit given that it was an imposter.

Ok, next two questions.   Do we agree that the Oswald inside the Consulate was not wearing a sweater and tie according to the staff descriptions?    If so, then where is the first known occurrence of this particular photo and what agency would have had it in their files prior to October, 1963.

Along with those questions, what Agency or group would have had copies of the materials that the person at the consulate showed during the visit.

The answers to both questions would seem to tell us who was behind the visit, assuming it was not Oswald.