Larry Hancock

Steve, what I recall was his saying that it should be found in the material that had been archived with a certain library...do not recall which one...people looked and found nothing. I honestly can't believe that a film showing Oswald in a camp in the New Orleans area would not have generated conversations, memos, copies of the film, frames from the film...something for corroboration. No souvenirs. I mean it would be the smoking gun of him as anything but a loner.

Jim, if he brought witnesses in to watch it and make identifications should there not be some documentation of that. Given its explosive nature should he not have written memos on it that are in the files...did he really leave no written record of his investigation of the film (at the office...even if documents were stolen from his home...and where is the internal record of those thefts?). I'm just not sanguine that something that key would have not been discussed with someone who could corroborate him...who were the witnesses, surely they could confirm it and talked about it later? Afraid I have to remain the skeptic on this film without some iota of corroboration...

Off the top of the head I think he was involved in vice and possibly the crime squad ....which is why he was so useful to Giancana. Apparently he was a good cop until he realized he could be a cop and still make good money on the side...

The Spartacus overview seems quite through to me and I think much of it is from the book I mentioned which is cited in the overview; you can get it at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Tangled+Web%3A+The+Life+and+Death+of+Richard+Cain&x=16&y=15 Two minor points, Cain did set up an investigative business in Mexico City and appears to have done some training but his approach to the CIA was simply an offer to provide human intelligence rather than to offer his service in placing bugs or wiretaps (a claim that often appears in JFK books and articles). The CIA didn't see any value in his contacts and simply rebuffed him. There is a possibility that Cain was part of the courier chain to get the first poison into Cuba for the initial attempt on Castro, no proof of that but he was in Florida at the right time and might even have carried it into the country. Just speculation though. Another minor point is that Cain is sometimes mentioned as having provided the information on tracing the Carcano back to the firm that ostensibly sold it to Oswald. That is not correct and occurred because Cain is mentioned in a document which is in the same batch of documents which does contain info on the rifle. Its a common mistake since the FBI sometimes placed a number of related documents together in investigative files - related either by city or time frame, if you are not reading very closely its easy to get lost.

Jim, his stepbrother wrote a detailed bio and presented twice at Lancer on him. I discuss him a bit in SWHT and there are a ton of MFF files dealing with him....unfortunately a number of people write about his CIA connections without really doing the homework on that, a search will show you what the CIA really thought of him - suggested by the fact that they refused several approaches from him to provide info in Mexico City (pre assassination). Basically he was a Giancana source and asset within Chicago PD and eventually ended up - after the assassination - in Mexico with Giancana. I'll try to recall the name of the book, its buried somewhere under tons of other books in deep storage...

On the Cuban missile crisis related FIB concerns, its important to remember that the FIB was one of a series of similar groups established over time to allow brainstorming and even contentious discussion of how America was responding to the existential world communist threat - all of them designed to thrash issues around and give the President an education before he personally engaged in final decision making. That was a conceptual approach begun under President Truman and continued under Eisenhower - during an era before the emergence of what has been called the "operational presidency" where communications and access to information tended to demand less dialog and more military like decision making by Presidents. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis which actually demonstrated that all the structured brainstorming and dialog on policy might become moot under certain circumstances. Following the BOP, JFK and of course RFK treated the challenge of Castro and Cuba as something very special, almost a personal challenge. To that extent certain of the existing policy groups were minimized and special groups focused on Cuba or Cuba and Laos (from a covert operations perspective) came to be in the drivers seat. Given operational security the FIB was probably frozen out but during the next couple of decades a number of the practices of the immediate post-war period were going to change. Its amazing when you study the Guatemala project and compare it to the new Cuba projects (AMTRUNK, AMLASH,AMWORLD of 1963/64). Things would change even more in the future...take a look at the Wiki on the FIB and see what happened to it beginning under George Bush. And of course take a look at today's headlines to see how far such practices can ultimately fall.

Well then you can understand how desperate that both the FBI and CIA were to keep the huge secret that we had the Russian and Cuban embassies under photo surveillance in 1963 and - gasp - might have attempted to bug them. Oh wait, there is that CIA station history document saying both the Russians and Cubans were worried about being bugged and it was a constant race to plant new listening devices and taps when ones were found. Consternation indeed.....

The subject of drones is a very interesting one and most folks don't realize that the US used drones extensively in SE Asia not only over North Vietnam but over China. Of course the drones were quite large, they were really autonomous aircraft in that respect. But they were just one facet of the tools developed during that conflict and then dropped afterwards as the military returned to its comfort zone and wiped out its institutional memory of how to deal with asymmetric warfare - something it had to totally and painfully learn a few decades later. That's a big part of the story in Shadow Warfare and its an important one since we are just about to go through the same cycle again as we move back into Cold War 2.0 and the big forces agenda of the Trump administration (if you missed the seventies and early eighties the first time around, no problem, you get to see it all again). The document you linked to is a fascinating one and I've seen reference to parts of but not the whole document. Its a wonderful summary of exactly what was going to change under JFK as the FIB helped reveal what was going on - and it certainly would have played a part in his directives to move covert military operations over to the military (well that and the fiascos of Indonesia, the BOP and covert ops into North Vietnam). I think its also important in showing that the CIA was not without some level of oversight; to the FIB and to the NSC covert ops oversight committee it was just an agency that needed managing. Its also noteworthy that groups like State were as much concerned over covert political action as covert military action....we tend to focus strictly on the paramilitary side but globally it was only part of the picture. As to your question on who was going to lose more, the answer is pretty clearly that the Plans and Operations Directorate would be the loser and most specifically the folks in P/P, paramilitary and political action. Which circa 63 meant people like Shackley, Fitzgerald and most specifically like the folks at JM/WAVE - Morales, Robertson, Jenkins et al. They would have at best become trainers rather than actual operators - or possibly retained for totally deniable actions such as in the Congo in 1964. Its interesting to note that Russia is reviving the CIA's deniablity tactics of that era to a new level today.; Putin is releasing troops and hiring contractors and sending them to the Ukraine and now to Egypt/Libya - but in doing so he can stand up and claim that no Russian military are involved. Its the same old game...we repeatedly played it and now Putin has opened up the book once more.

Steve, it looks to me like there are two redacted programs....not sure why they would still be redacted but the Oxcart/A12 could certainly be one because it was still in test and development. Given that they mention drones - which is really early given this date - the only other thing I can think of is the drone project which was kicking off for reconnaissance over North Vietnam, using the Ryan Firebee variants. I don't recall the name of the classified project but I have a book on it. Anyway, those two might do it even though I don't seen the need for redaction. There were also a couple of military space programs in the works and either Dynasoar or the Air Force MOL manned orbiting lab/recon platform could be a possibility. I don't think the Corona follow on projects were in the pipeline that early but that's another option.

Well Corona was definitely the satellite project, hidden within the Explorer program. Not sure about the third, could you post a link so I can check the verbiage. My guess is that it might have been signals intelligence in the Tonkin Gulf, we had ground based SIGNIT going in South Vietnam but a brand new project was to put a containerized unit onto a Navy destroyer and send it up and down the Tonkin Gulf to monitor signals in support of the covert naval missions increasingly going into North Vietnam - which of course ultimately led to the one actual attack on a destroyer patrol and the second non-attack and escalation, etc. There was also an escalating signals intelligence project against Soviet missile launches, based in Turkey. Those are the first two that come to mind.

Steve, this really does illustrate a good point - we JFK types tend to get hung up on the CIA, in particular the Plans and Operations Directorate of the CIA because that's where some of our most familiar names connect - and where Cuban operations occurred. But the intelligence world was a lot bigger than that (and is far more diverse now). The Intelligence Board, which was preceded by the Intelligence Committee serves both the NSC and the Office of the President and is supposed to integrate what are often very conflicting analyses from different groups (during the 1950s Air Force intelligence and CIA intel were often adamantly in conflict). The fact that the CIA director served as Chairman and ultimately did the Presidential daily briefings obscured a lot of that disagreement and of course while the Dulles brothers were the primary drivers of foreign policy that did as well. Its simply a fact that increasingly in 1963 a good number of analysts within the intel community were not sanguine about success in covert or political action action against Cuba. That could probably be said even for CIA operations, certainly Shackley thought the new 1963 initiatives pushed by RFK were doomed to fail, and said so. JFK and especially RFK wanted to keep pressure on Castro but that may have been more for leverage (on JFK's part) in possible negotiations than anything else. The same could be said for operations against Vietnam which I go into in detail in Shadow Warfare. The CIA had failed in those operations to the extent that it was being handed off to the Army and the Army's losses would be equally bad. Its true that some bad info on Vietnam was being fed back to DC but if you actually dig into both the Board's material and the State Department's material on both Cuba and Vietnam you find a great deal of the real story - and I suspect JFK actually had a pretty good view of the reality. But of course reality and public opinion often clash under the umbrella of politics. So knowing the reality still presented him with a huge challenge in facing an upcoming election year.

Steve, I wrote about this disconnect in NEXUS in regard to the Cuba programs circa 1963. Since about 1960 the FIB had been expressing negative opinions about the ability to overthrow Castro, about Cuba, about Viet Nam etc. They became increasingly negative in 1963. But you have to remember, the FIB was a composite organization with representatives from several intel groups and with input from analysts with different views than the CIA. The FIB and its predecessor group had a long history of institutional jousting with the CIA as well. Interestingly several years ago Professor John Williams presented his study of FIB meetings and intel tasking for several months following the assassination of JFK and it was very obvious that there was no serious national intelligence tasking on the subject beyond the work of the WC.

A short answer is that yes the police do an inventory - the complete contents taken from Nagell went into evidence as well as a list. Ultimately only part of the list was released during his various legal actions and only part of the materials taken. So we have only a partial inventory - which does not even include items on his person as I recall. There will never be a solid chain of evidence of all of it including that particular card which Dick himself found in going though the materials released to his lawyer. Its a very long story but anyone who has a copy of SWHT can find the details in my treatment of Nagell... Dick Russell has posted on this here before, its come up a number of times. You may find something on a search for his posts.

It was indeed! I don't know that the Marines had a field signals group as the Army did but its possible. There is no doubt the Navy did as they operated a series of signals intel ships and also had containerized Sigint equipment that they could put on ships as small as destroyers. That leads into the whole matter of the Tonkin Gulf incident where destroyers were making signals runs to monitor the covert sea attacks into North Vietnam...it was those totally deniable attacks which the NVN patrol boats were responding to in the Gulf. Would be interesting to see if the Marines did have such a unit and if Oswald could have been a candidate.

I think this might give some good background for the Army Security Agency reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Security_Agency Basically those were either intercept operators for electronic collections activities...which included linquists but there were other roles for signals intelligence and even secure equipment technicians. All had to have the clearances mentioned above. For the Army it was more tactical with units embedded in the field (as an aside, it was ASA field intercepts which largely give lie to the second Gulf of Tonkin incident). The Air Force had a similar career field but those folks were assigned to more strategic collections, targeting major communications channels, primarily Russian military but with other teams targeting other foreign nations. If you have read about Kirknewton, that would be one of the Air Force Operations.

I'll leave that to you all Paul, I was just trying to provide reference information. I will say that if you go through the 112th references I have mentioned before you will find that there was a very active link between regional Army intel ie the 112th and the DPD intel folks on a regular basis, well before the Texas trip. Ditto between both them and the FBI because of weapons thefts and even simpe matters like security background checks. I spoke at length with one reserve DPD officer who described to me that the DPD routinely monitored locations known to be homosexual hangouts, made lists of names and provided them to FBI and the Army if military personnel were involved - just SOP, nobody thought anything about it in those times. It was assumed that homosexuals could be blackmailed and were therefore security risks. You also find a number of former Army officers and reserve/guard officers on the DPD itself - not too unusual for law enforcement in general. Of course that was the status quo, which does not mean there was not something truly anomalous going on around to JFKs visit.

To keep this in the proper time-frame, my understanding is that the Army's involvement in this extensive domestic surveillance program was initiated under OPPLAN 100-68, in response to an Executive Directive from President Johnson as a response to the nationwide race riots and violence of 1965-1967, beginning with Watts. This led to a number of joint Army, Police and FBI intelligence projects such as Lantern Spike (which involved the 111 MIG, another regional group) - the FBI also dramatically expanded its Contelpro program under that directive. For more on the FBI part I would recommend Spying on America by James Davis. Several of the Army programs were carried out under the auspices of the Army Security Command and Army Intelligence - especially when Civil Disorder Operations were ordered around specific events and cities. If you all find a reference to it starting in advance of that time frame I'd really like to know so please post it...thanks

That's pretty much what I would expect Steve, as I said previously there were only a few units around the nation in each staff specialty area - that is one reason they had links up to the same specialty groups at the Pentagon, DIA, Army intel school etc. The same is still true today although we don't hear all that much about it...you will recall there was a specialty counter insurgency exercise across the southern states a couple of years ago which prompted a lot of concern. One of the reasons we hear less about it is that we have been deploying reserve and guard units so much overseas for so many years now that they get their experience off shore....very different than back in the fifties and sixties.

David, in terms of Texas Army units, the regular Fourth Army command which included Texas and several adjacent states had been designated as a training and recruiting command following WWII, in general all the regional commands had one major specialty plus some fairly routine duties including actually supporting Reserve and Guard units. There were always close relationships, and you see a lot of crossover as individuals moved from Regular to one or the other active service or retirement. My impression is that a lot of officers in particular, wanted to stay involved and that there was a certain amount of pork-barrel in the case of at least some reserve units....securing reserve units was part of the overall political game for Congressmen. I don't know specifically why Texas got an intel unit but my impression is that the Texas units were built largely around staff specialties and G2 is one of those. That would have been staff level work plus field intelligence. Those are the sorts of staff you want on hand if you do a call up and start building large units from scratch. Finding combat folks is easy when you are rebuilding, but finding intelligence, logistics, artillery, special forces is something else again so you want to have a pool handy. I've run across a handful of WWII intelligence officers who were from Texas, Howard Burris being one. My gut tells me it was a relatively glamorous specialty and that may have led to lobbying to get a reserve intel unit in Texas. And yes, generally both reserves and Guard members are locals, especially the officers. That makes for extra stability in the units which is desirable. Hard enough to keep a reserve unit ready to go into combat, best if their officers are former regular Army and if they have local ties and are going to be around for a good while.

Steve, I certainly agree that the tactical folks needed people on the ground. My hypothesis has been that what they really needed was someone with contacts into the DPD, who could pick up gossip about the motorcade planning, security etc and provide recommendations on local support people who could be unwittingly used...people who would be sacrificial if necessary. I think they needed a couple of dirty cops or former cops who could get uniforms, they may have brought weapons with them or needed to source weapons, ammo and other gear locally so someone who could make introductions to a trusted contact for that would be good. Basically I've felt for some time now time the primary field contact recruited for Dallas was Jack Ruby and he was a perfect fit for everything I listed above. That was really the extent of his role but he got a very new one assigned - which actually made him physically ill for a time - after news spread of Oswald's arrest...alive. I wondered down a lot of paths before fixing on Ruby, but in the end he fits so well and a micro analysis of his activities supports him as the guy so well that I have focused on him as the key element in the local "means".

Interestingly this may also help explain another old time mystery. Years ago when some of us were looking more deeply into the organizational structure of the DPD, local sources told us that a DPD intelligence unit (or at least some DOD intelligence personnel) were working out facilities at the Fair Grounds. That seemed pretty strange at the time but now I'm wondering if a number of groups moved at least some of their intelligence people into the new emergency operations center to take advantage of new digs and better communications?

JFK had initiated the formal COG program about a year before, pretty sure it was sometime in 1962 (just going from memory here); before that Eisenhower had done some very informal COG preparation, distributing letters authorizing certain individuals to assume power and recreate the Federal infrastructure, especially the financial infrastructure. As I recall Texas has some plans for extensive civil defense including some truly massive bunker systems around the state. I suspect the Dallas bunker was part of that and was indeed created for atomic civil defense; within a few years COG facilities in other states and cities were being used to respond to civil disturbances and race riots. There is a good deal of information available on this, much of in in materials on nuclear warfare preparedness and civil defense. I waded through it when I was researching Surprise Attack. I recall finding a newspaper article describing the massive bunker systems - which of course were too expensive to ever really built. As you might imagine law enforcement as well as Reserve and Guard units were very involved in the Civil Defense preparedness and drills. Personally I can remember when the atomic shelter signs started going up on Post Offices and other State and Federal buildings.

Go Navy....my comment was intended to be humorous but more seriously I have to be honest and say that I believe there is truly a place for intelligence work, whether in the military, the CIA or elsewhere in the national intelligence community. I don't think that anyone is particularly suspicious because they were or are working in intelligence. Sometimes I get the feeling that we paint with such broad brushes that everyone and everything gets to be suspicious. On the other hand, there are certainly intelligence connected folks who went rogue, and that doesn't just apply to the Kennedy era - you can find it going all the way back to Guatemala and all the way forward through Viet Nam and through Iran Contra to Afghanistan. Even worse post 9/11. I spend more than enough time on the sins of intelligence in Shadow Warfare. No offense meant in the post, as I said, both Larry H and I went down this military road years ago because we were curious about not only these Colonels but a lot of other anecdotal stories about particular military connections of the time. You are just slogging through the same things we already butted our heads against. Maybe you will get further, I can only share the sorts of things we found and talked about back then. I will say the more I work in the areas of military and national intelligence the more I'm forced to constantly educate myself and the more challenging it is to understand how things were organized back then vs. how they are now. One of my standard intelligence reference books that was a great reference up to the 90's was five hundred pages, the current edition is eight hundred and thirty.

I know that being skeptical about this area is not what you all want to hear so I'll stop with this post. I will say that both Larry Haapanen and I researched this unit as we did a number of scenarios for military involvement in the assassination. But I would caution anyone going this route to spend time understanding how these military commands work and the complexity of the reporting structures for reserve units - when you do certain things become much less mysterious. Things work a bit differently in the regular active service, compared to the Reserves and even more so as compared to Guard units. For example, there were only a handful of reserve military intelligence specialist units around the nation and being reserve units they were attached to regional commands but also had a line of reporting within their military specialty area - in this instance that would be to Army intelligence at Pentagon level, to DIA and no doubt from a training perspective to Fort Hoalobird. (sp). If mobilized they could likely be assigned into either staff positions in those locations or to intelligence units with fully activated combat military units. Nothing about such a line of reporting is truly unusual or actually interferes with the unit being a group of former staff officers who jointed a reserve unit because somebody had enough clout to organize and get funding for that sort of unit - the reserve and guard units are a bit more "political" than you might think in that respect. As I recall we found out that a number of former Army officers from around the State of Texas who decided to join this reserve unit and a number of them were indeed working with police forces. We may even have located a Guard intelligence specialty unit, don't remember for sure on that. Now of course both Larry and I were in the military, in the Air Force, and he was actually an officer (I was just an NCO) so we might not be all that trustworthy.... The good news for everyone is that I understand Tosh Plumlee has a new book coming out and in the old days Tosh had me chasing after some really mysterious military intelligence units hidden under cover at small, local, civil airfields....you will find that even more challenging, I certainly did.

Well you could have that or you have a few good old Texas boys doing some social networking, keeping their uniforms, holding onto some rank for their resumes and being able to meet monthly while making a little money at the same time. If you do a scan of Texas social and political events you find a lot of fellows still listed as carrying rank and military titles who are certainly not active Army, usually the reference is to either Reserve or Guard not regular Army - looks good on the club roster too...after all being referred to as a Major or a Colonel is sort of a southern tradition... Of course there would be no need for any brand new secret society, Klan organizations and Minutemen groups were readily available and military rank of any sort much desired and respected in such organizations. Although to be a real stand out leader it was best to be a retired Admiral or General.... Still, there's nothing more fun than a good, shadowy secret society ....