Larry Hancock

State Department and AID covers were probably the most common for mid-level CIA officers while the lower level operations personnel and those from other sections generally used commercial covers.  Morales used State Dept covers earlier in his career as did Phillips. 

It was assumed CIA personnel would be placed under diplomatic cover at embassies and consulates, same for KGB.

Bard states where it is obtaining its records and identified a public source - but then says it cannot find them in that public source.  So it knows they exist and is excerpting information from them but then cannot locate them to support its information. It does not say it can locate them but they are classified and cannot be accessed.

Given that the numbers it gives do not correspond to those known to be related to that source suggests its not a matter of release but rather a matter of such documents being real.

Of course someone may have given the AI the ability to tease..?

To be blunt, creating a mystery out of this as if there were some major source of searchable records that the AI can find and nobody else has - including NARA itself -   deserves some confirmation before we jump into one more sensational mystery among those we already face. I'd suggest you contact NARA on Monday and get their opinion.

Otherwise somebody might want to notify the FBI that a huge national security problem has emerged and the AI is compromising who knows what secret and unreleased files...surely someone should be concerned?

See my note on the document number problem...the AI is not even getting number formats right and these are not legitimate document numbers at all...which is probably why its generating documents and then not finding them.

It appears that the AI is getting its number formatting wrong, all of these are missing a digit in the last character set so something pretty fundamental is wrong in how the AI is searching for - and finding records.  I'd be hesitant to accept anything its providing at this point...

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/rif-numbers

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It gets complex when people are allowed to stay in their service as a cover....Morales held an Army cover for a long while....ditto State, ditto USAID as compared to when they are simply "detailed" to the CIA as Lansdale was so his promotions and pay came from the Air Force.  The simple answer is who was cutting their check at a given point in time i.e. who was their legal federal employer.  You would have to find who signed off on their promotions, their pay, their retirement... but the reality would always be who was giving them their day to day tasking.  Vietnam was especially difficult in that since the Ambassador was nominally in charge, same for Laos. 

Lots of military in SE Asia were detailed to the CIA for orders and tasking while still paid by their service, that was especially true for pilots early in Vietnam and in Laos or Cambodia later.

The first answer is easy,  Chief of Station/CIA was John Richardson during 62/63,  nominally he would have reported to the Hemisphere Director for the CIA whose name escapes me at the moment, who then reported to the CIA Director John McCone and as usual the Deputy Directory acting for the Director.

Of course Conein had become known to all the military players in Vietnam while working for Lansdale as the initial CIA station chief,  Conein being assigned first to covert operations in the North and then to campaigns against the insurgency in the South - he had a lengthy personal history with the Generals.

As head of Joints Chiefs Special Affairs Staff, Prouty was tasked with supporting "covert" CIA military operations i.e. operations were American military equipment (primarily aircraft, boats, supplies) were to be used in deniable operations.  Basically coordinating getting the asset from the military unit that owned it into the operation and making sure it got written off in proper deniable fashion. That would have applied to action in Laos but by 63 Vietnam was much more overtly American military, even for US ground forces and so were the supplies going there.  

As far as loyalties, I'd say it was more a matter of Conein being former military, a combat vet and ideologically a devout anti-Communist - anti-Communism was the driving ideology of the time and it certainly was for Conein.   It was an existential war against the Communists wherever he was serving, and of course most CIA officers were out of WWII service as well and shared the same attitude.  Beyond that everybody competed with each other as they always do for resources, recognition and position,  military vs. state dept, state department against CIA, army vs. navy, air force vs navy.   If you doubt that just look at how they talked about each other in their own internal communications - which is why I've pointed out that the best place to find out what the CIA was doing many times is in the FRUS State Dept records, not in CIA documents.   

I wrote about this in SWHT and unfortunately don't recall the details but there was an inquiry into the missing medical material and I came across an internal document essentially saying it had actually been pursued but matters were so sensitive in regard to RFK and the Kennedy family that it was thought best to drop the subject and not pursue it further....it was sort of a notification that the subject was being dropped and everybody should just walk away from it.

In fall 1963 Conein was still working for the Chief of Station, CIA in Saigon but taking orders and acting in regard to the Diem brothers and the coup from State Department officials. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=931#relPageId=668&search=lucian_conein

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=945#relPageId=461&search=lucian_conein

As is often the case State Department documents give  you a more accurate picture of the reality at a given point in time than CIA documents do...

Following the coup and assassination of Diem he was called back to DC to be interview about all those events in Saigon.  We spent a good bit of time on his papers a few years ago and found a lot of correspondence of his communications with the Generals and his rather desperate aircraft to be used to fly the Diem brothers out of the country (nothing that said they had agreed).  He was unable to obtain an aircraft for that purpose as they were all tied up and scheduled in military and supply operations and he held no special priority - apparently he was making that effort on his own, not directed out of DC.  

I could not find any document to show exact dates of his travel to and from Saigon and I'm not familiar with any of the documents reflected in this thread - in a quick check of MFF I found nothing even similar.  I hesitate to spend too much time on it since it appears that virtually everything coming from this source needs to be labeled with a warning. 

Paul, if you look at the routing slips and copy lists you find that sharing information between the CIA and many other agencies including the services and various military groups was simply routine practice / SOP....that's why they call it the intelligence community and talk abut national intelligence.  Nothing especially mysterious, its the day job. 

As an example the MIG's were tasked with monitoring travel to and from Cuba as well as both pro and anti Castro activities and they reported on that to other agencies and in turn were copied by other agencies.  A 112th officer in NO picked up a leaflet from Oswald's first outing, made a report, it got into a file and the FBI and others were copied.  In turn the FBi returned the favor and an Oswald file resulted at the 112th HQ....which is why on Nov. 22 when an officer heard the name Oswald he could pull a file on it, find the name Hidell (from the FBI) and advise DPD of that.  We have all that correspondence on the record, no mystery.

Nobody apparently reads the intelligence community books I post on - yes they are expensive - to see how things are set up to work - so you can look for exceptions which would be suspect.  Painting with such a broad brush in terms of Army intelligence (with many levels under many commands) or the JCS (with many staffs but no direct command authority) here is really as bad as just talking about the Mafia, which used to the the suspect community of choice.

I've wrestled with the LeMay issue for so long - even chaired a panel on it at one Lancer conference - that all I am comfortable with saying is that he was on vacation, then hunting in the Canadian woods, actually had a fairly long hike to get to a small Canadian airfield (not airport) where he could be picked up by a plane dispatched by his aide. We don't have specific information on that flight other than the remarks from the aide and the tower log that turned up later.  Certainly there is no sign that he landed at Andrews at time close to the arrival of the aircraft from Dallas and considering that arrangements were still being made while AF1 was in the air it makes sense that his arrival was a good bit later - not even sure he was picked up on a jet as the Canadian airfield was more like a local field. 

But there is no evidence to indicate he did not land at Andrews since that is where the special aircraft unit that operates those planes and does communications with them is housed. 

https://aerocorner.com/blog/who-pilots-air-force-one-how-to-become-a-presidential-pilot/

How soon and if he got to Bethesda is a whole separate and entirely anecdotal story....as far as I know nobody ever actually interviewed the Bethesda command staff about the arrival of any flag rank officers or even as to their observation of the autopsy, which would have been interesting given that the admiral in charge outranked and overruled the request of the President's Doctor to not conduct a full autopsy but rather only recover bullets and fragments as evidence.  Livingston, not much read these days, is one of the best sources on that sort of detail.

Ben you have me stumped on that?   I recall the exchanges between and aide to LeMay and AF1, he is communicating to AF1 in regard to LeMay.

But LeMay's aid was not on AF1, he was in DC and routed through the comm center that handled communications with the special unit charged with White House and other official aircraft - that center was in communications with AF1 as well as the delegation that was outbound to Japan over the Pacific.  

Could you give me a link or reference to the conversation between the aid and LeMay that you referenced; I do recall them being in contact through Single Side Band radio but I do not remember a tape or transcript of that exchange).

If anything is liable to make an AI stumble its probably the JFK assassination ....

LeMay was in Canada on a hunting trip, after having earlier been on vacation in the Midwest.   This has been discussed and deconstructed so many times that the fact that its still in doubt at this time, that people writing books are getting it that wrong and that anyone would rely on Google for an answer is really depressing.  Of course it does demonstrate that its possible to make a mystery out of anything I suppose and that actual answers never "stick" as well as the mysteries.

As to the AF1 tape, having studied it and knowing something of AF communications I can support Doug is saying there is missing voice and possibly data traffic.  I also have researched and presented on the control and actual release of the tape, and the transcript used by Manchester. However the voice traffic that is on the record is reliable and support's Doug on LeMay's location - for that matter we know the aircraft he used to get back to DC and the Canadian air field it flew out of that day.  

https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/air-force-one-tape-and-general-lemay/

If somebody shows me the telegram I will back off and restudy...until then the factual answer is, LeMay was hunting in Canada.

It think it would be reasonable to at least consider a Russian speaker doing international business (he was a consulting petroleum engineer) as a potential "CIA" source (door number 2 in your post),  in this case especially one who volunteered to teach Russian classes for a local library (not all that typical in 1963 Fort Worth/Dallas but where Oswald came across him). 

Frankly I would have expected the FBI to have been more likely to have recruited him as a source given how well networked he appears to have been in the Russian expat community.

First off I think this might be a bit excessive in thinking of getting information from Oswald in terms of a structured "debrief" - or somehow suggesting that the Minsk radio factory had been a specific target of intelligence collection or had some strategic value other than a factory that did do military work in one section (as most all of them did).  The factory and actually everything about how Oswald had been handled in the Soviet Union would all have been of interest as part of domestic intelligence collection from a US citizen coming back from overseas.  

Its long been rumored that someone from the Agency did meet and talk with Oswald in NYC,  very probably under a cover - but Oswald did not pass on the notes he had smuggled back then, he took them all to Dallas and compiled notes and experience and diary into a partial manuscript (it might have been much longer if he had not run out of money).   Did Gregory encourage him to do that...maybe, could Gregory have suggested that he do that if he was a source for DO but that would have been off on the timing because Oswald contacted the stenographer on June 18 and did not contact Gregory until June 26.   If I'm right on those dates then Oswald might have been following up on a conversation in New York and immediately moved to put his material together almost as soon as he got to Fort Worth. 

Best guess, somebody contacted him under cover in New York and at least relayed some minimal information from him on his time in Russia....Oswald had hoped he would be approached by the press but was not, as far as we know, but he was very willing to talk and had even prepared notes for himself to do that while he was on the ship coming back.  

Doesn't look like a newbie post to me Gerry..   Unfortunately I've gotten to the point where unless I can see some documents with routing and sign off information on them I am uncomfortable with reaching conclusions.   As I posted above I suspect in 63 Domestic Contacts and not under Barnes but indeed under DDI.  Given Barnes problems after the Bay of Pigs its sort of hard to see him remaining under DDP but possible I suppose - certainly if Domestic Ops is the way I envision it then it would be supporting field operations overseas so that would make some sense.  In that event moving him inside DDP would not really have been a demotion, just getting him out of the spotlight.

In reference to Moore and debriefing Oswald via De Mohrenschildt keep in mind that De Mohrenschildt's first visit to Oswald was some time after his return, Oswald had already made Russian community contacts and been introduced to a number of folks in the Fort Worth community before De Mohrenschildt visited him - and Oswald's manuscript had already typed well before that time.

Bob, the best guess I can make from the 1964 chart is that Barnes would have been moved under DDI....to keep him away from DDP for one thing,  I'd love to see the charts that go under Office of Operations and Office of Basic Intelligence.

Gerry, I would need to see a lot more Domestic Contacts / Domestic Operations documents to offer an answer - my impression has been that they were separate groups under the same management at HQ but that is only an impression.  I would assume they would be compartmentalized as Domestic  Operations would be supporting a lot of highly covert activities - quite different than Domestic Contacts. 

Email me a few dozen documents on both and I'll call in some help and give a shot at coming up with an answer, sounds like fun...email document links to larryjoe@westok.net

Yes, that is the second Red Bird aircraft story which I posted about in the other thread....as for Oswald and plans to fly out, see the extensive detail in the paper David and I did:

http://dealeyplazauk.com/jfk-assassination/red-bird-airfield-leads/

Well being circumspect and all....grin....I also need to point out that there were two aircraft incidents at Red Bird, one involving the transport aircraft and the Cuban pilot and one involving a private plane and the attempt to rent it for along distance flight the week of the assassination, with an individual described as closely resembling Oswald present at the time. 

The two are quite separate, one with implications for the attack on JFK, the second with implications for framing Oswald.

David and I plan to present both stories at the Lancer conference in November and either would lend itself to some long talks in the hallways...or the bar...

It has and I cover that in great detail in my book In Denial....Bissell lied up and down the chain of command and the guys below him confirmed that...

January did not know the pilots name or was it given to him....our research paper in the link above posits who we suspect were the two individuals at Red  Bird.

The exchange paraphrased by January was basically that the Cuban exiles wanted revenge against both Kennedy's for what happened at the Bay of Pigs and that while JFK would be killed in Dallas they planned to "get" RFK as well...I don't want to derail this thread but if anyone wants extreme detail on the Red Bird affair:

http://dealeyplazauk.com/jfk-assassination/red-bird-airfield-leads/

Sometimes it hard fro me to keep up with Jeff and the lawyers both...grin.

The press conference will not be streamed live online, not sure if it will be captured in some fashion.