Larry Hancock

Thanks Glen, its all just part of many hears of slogging....and some slightly spooky interludes like the night time tour of locations in Dallas including some of the spots mentioned in my previous post. It seemed pretty clear that the person talking to me knew what he was talking about. We ended that tour with a visit to Walker's former residence.

I can add from personal experience that I was told by a member of a DPD reserve unit which focused on "subversives" that Walker was routinely monitored - including observation of his visits to clubs frequented by known homosexuals to actual rendezvous at private meeting spots. Of course at the time the standard intelligence interest was that such contacts made the individual accessible to blackmail and of course Walker as a former senior military commander did hold knowledge of the American military in Europe. I cannot vouch for that information on his monitoring although I can vouch that the individual worked for DPD in the duties he described to me.

Linda and Tommy, thanks for the postings, I think this is a most interesting thread and shows some great research. Linda, I found your most recent post very interesting - that scenario would explain a great many otherwise mysterious things. Keep up the good work! Larry

Thanks Paul, good to have that tied down...

Paul, did he mention any sources or give us reason to believe that what he wrote was more than his own speculation based on the books he had read?

Paul, you keep posting excerpts from a book whose author is unknown, whose primary or original sources are unknown and whose only cites are to other JFK conspiracy books - as you noted. Plus the true author is apparently using the name of a real, historical person - which seems to be a rather serious problem unless you have found something to suggest it is not a serious misrepresentation. Correct me if I overstated the above but what have you found that suggests the book or the excerpts you are posting is anything other than some unknown writer's speculation?

Paul, it is indeed hard to get too excited about a book which seems to have been written relatively recently but cites only JFK books and apparently gives no original sources or apparently cites any

local Dallas or Texas sources. Beyond that we don't know who wrote it. And we know they apparently decided to represent it as a work by Will Fritz when there is no obvious link to him. Or am

I missing something? Certainly its a new one on me.

Uh Paul, I'm pretty sure the main villain in Seven Days in May was modeled off Curtis LeMay - or at least a more PR oriented version of LeMay

Very sad news. Gary and I frequently disagreed on "interpretations" but we maintained a long term dialog and he was always an excellent resource. May he rest in peace.

Very good point Stephen, actually JFK Lancer has a set of links to a variety of different document sources and resources - not forums or discussion groups but actual resource. Its at:

http://www.jfklancer.com/curatorcollections.html

John, I'm afraid I can't give much further in terms of detail as I was not acquainted with Mary in the earliest decades of her collection. I do know she did request and obtain large numbers of documents directly from the NARA bulk files (I described how that works/worked in an earlier post), friends helped her sort them, filed them and prepare indexes. Those documents were from the JFK investigations records collections that were legally turned over to the National Archives. Beyond that individual researchers did their own trips and requests to NARA and many donated copies to Mary. Eventually that collection was put on line at the MFF web site, a massive effort of scanning and posting. And those documents were added too by bulk collections from the ARRC (originally many of the ARRC documents had been made available on CD) as well as from other collections held by NARA. Hopefully you have visited the MFF site for a good idea of the range of documents available. Later, documents and other materials including some correspondence, personal files and even books were transferred to Baylor University where they are held now and are publicly available. If you are anyone else is in search of details beyond that you can certainly contact Rex Bradford directly through the MFF web site or I can send you his email. He does have a full time day job and at this point all his MFF work is strictly volunteer so you probably won't get an instant response.

Of course all the original documents in the collection are still available at NARA, on microfilm and in print so anyone wishing to do primary research only has to go directly to NARA - the same way many of us did in the pre-HTML, MFF days.

Always entertaining to remember Jaye, lots of phone calls plus the special mailing list we had back in the Compuserve days. But the most entertaining was the night long ride with him around Dallas, stopping for him to make payphone calls and all sorts of mysterious stuff like that....and that was the first time I ever met him in person. Was supposed to introduce him to Madelyne Brown but that fell through at the last minute - later he sold her a PC I think. Ah, the good old days..

John, you can answer your question by going directly to the AARC, which is one of the primary sources for JFK related documents.

http://aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/contents_jfk.htm

John, I don't know that when Mary was getting documents that she was using FOIA per se, I know I wasn't back in the 90's and she was at it decades earlier. It was just a matter of doing NARA requests and getting records out of the JFK collection, not from individual agencies. You requested them by mail from NARA and they did pulls for you or you went there and copied them yourself. As I understand it both Weisburg and AARC got bulk copies of JFK collection records due to the result of legal actions. So we are talking about batches of documents from NARA and the JFK collections...WC, HSCA, and even the Church Committee etc rather than documents specifically released via FOIA request from the original agencies generating them.

I've only gotten into FOIA effectively when I knew very specifically what I was looking for and could go to the original agency, and even then in many cases they respond that the records in question have been turned over

to NARA so then its off to NARA. Basically FOIA is a "forcing" tool to get records out of the agency of you can define them pretty tightly, the MFF collections may well contain documents produced that way

by researchers and donated by my guess is the vast amount are bulk pulls directly from the various JFK collections at NARA.

Also for the sake of full disclosure, its been many years since I went to NARA myself, fortunately by friend and co-author Stu Wexler is close to NARA and also expert at FOIA. He's done the yeoman's work with NARA and still fights multi-year battles over our FOIA requests; he recently got a batch of FOIA material that we had requested three years ago and got that only after two constructive challenges of FBI rejections. Most of my current work tends to take me to other sources and collections other than the NARA JFK collections.

Dawn, I did contact Joan and she said that her book is absolutely still moving towards publication; I'm waiting on an estimated date from her before posting anything specific. I have not seen any of its content myself.

John, my impression is that the bulk of Mary's documents came from her requests but as David said other researchers did share as well. I don't know anyone other than Anna Marie Kuhns Walko who actually marked documents they had themselves obtained from NARA. I should point out that a very large number of the documents on the MFF web site now came from the ARRC who got them directly from releases to NARA. Again, if anyone wants details I suggest you contact Rex Bradford directly, he would have the most accurate information.

Ron, no answer for you on the tape but I have a friend who was in a bus outside the Pentagon when the attack happened and she saw plane sections on the ground afterwards and she along with others and the whole bus she was boarding was covered by a cloud of very recognizable jet fuel....there was no doubt in her mind that a plane had been flown into the structure.

John, I don't know that there is an argument, there had been a claim that someone, at some point, altered an original document provided to the Warren Commission. the original should be on microfilm and

paper copy file at the National Archives. That claim needs to be investigated to determine if it is true and if the document scan on the MFF site does indeed not reflect the original document. Given that there

are a several steps in between the original document, the document that was transmitted to the ARRC and the document scan on the MFF site that investigation is going to take some time and will have

to go back to NARA and most likely involve getting some NARA assistance to review the originals for comparison purposes.

At this point, I've not seen anything presented beyond the assertion about a single set of Oswald time cards.

This should not need to be a matter of personalities, it should be a matter of research.

Thanks for posting that Kathy, honestly with the sort of comments there are from others on the forum who have been close to this whole story I'm not investing any more time in it personally. However since a very serious charge has been made against the MFF as a source and since nobody seems to have taken this directly to Rex before, I'm sure he is going to look into it. I will certainly pass on what he may find, and for that matter what the folks at NARA might find if he manages to get them interested - he did point out to me that all the original WC documents are on microfilm as well so its even possible to check the microfilm against any paper document at the archives.

I appreciate your looking it up and posting the link so folks who are new to this subject can get at least a bit of the history....

Ron, I have no knowledge of that but I do know that once most Agencies turn material over to the media and the scientific/professional research community they don't necessarily retain everything and for that matter material is sometimes just lost in the retention process or even taken....I think a few of the actual Lunar soil samples went that route. NASA went to a lot of trouble in past years to recover certain design documents that had gone into deep storage or off to archive sites. I know there is a temptation to find conspiracy in just about everything but I'm pretty sure no agency retains every document and piece of material in its own possession in perpetuity.

Karl, I will provide your reference to Rex for investigation. As to sourcing, I'll ask but my initial reaction is to go back to the process. Initially the primary source for what was posted was Mary's document collection, obtained from NARA the old fashioned way, by individual requests. That collection was expanded on by scanning of the bulk collection of documents provided by NARA to the ARRC as a result of a legal battle in which they were given access to copies of documents. That's my general knowledge of the process. There certainly is no process (or resource) to examine each document against the original item held at NARA.

At this point it appears that what exists is a scan of a document which Judyth posted with claims that it represents the original at NARA... That is presented compared to a document scanned by Rex and posted on MFF ...after being obtained from the ARRC. Obviously there are two questions......what does the original at NARA really look like and are their changes to it in the MFF scan....I suppose there is also the question of who handled the original document to obtain the scan presented by Judyth.

I'll refer this to Rex but of course anyone seriously interested can contact or visit NARA themselves as well. Just out of curiosity, could you elaborate on why marks relating to Judyth was supposed to be on Oswald's time card in the first place, is the claim that the markings were placed there by Oswald or Judyth herself?

Anyway, this is going to take some time to investigate, I'll pass this on to Rex for starters.

I have contacted Rex about this and he would be happy to investigate it. The Oswald time card document images on the MFF site were made from scans of actual documents provided by the ARRC.

In looking back at this thread the only solid accusation I could find was that Judyth claims that Oswald time card NARA documents contain the initials J somewhere on them and that those J's have been

deleted from the images on the MFF site - but are still on the NARA originals. Kathy asked for a posting of the NARA original which nobody seems to have done. Rex needs to know if this is the

only claimed alteration (the title of this thread seems to suggest something much broader?), if there are more. He would also like to know where the original NARA document has been posted

for comparison - of course he can obtain that document and compare them if it comes to that but he also needs to confirm what document is in question to do that so record numbers

would be helpful. Please post more details here or email them to me. A very strong charge has been made with this thread and it needs to be resolved. Rex will also be pursuing the subject with Jeff Morley.

I would certainly agree that as far as the actual Dallas team was concerned, they very much believed/hoped that the attack and the frame that was to follow would provoke

a strike against Castro. I'm not convinced that those further up the chain really believed that would happen or that it was their primary motivation. My view is that they

were acting against JFK as a perceived national security threat.

As to the FBI destroying all real evidence, that's an awfully broad statement - there is actually a lot of evidence in hand pointing towards conspiracy and that didn't get

destroyed, it simply got managed, spun and either obfuscated or diverted by FBI expert testimony. But you might well be talking about a different type of evidence

than I'm thinking of ......I certainly think that items linking Oswald to or showing direct interest in Oswald prior to the assassination by the FBI, CIA and and very possibly

ONI were destroyed but I also think much of that was in local files rather than headquarters files and such soft files can be and are often flushed without headquarters even

knowing it. Since such files have short term retention dates nobody knows the difference anyway.

Jim, I'm sure you know this but for newcomers its important to keep in mind that that within hours of the assassination every exile group and all their fellow travelers were reaching out to any contact they could find to promote

the story that Oswald was a Castro agent of some sort and acting for him in the assassination. The story line she was given is at least consistent with all the others...and then of course all their "hard evidence" never

seemed to jell. Actually there are FBI reports on some telling much the same story, such as the stories from Sturgis and Martino. We actually have FBI reports on many of those informants - did you ever find anyting

in the FBI files relating to the purported info provided by her boat guys?

Kathy and all, I have emailed Rex on this - it will be pretty embarrassing if nobody has at least raised the question with him up to this point. And as you say, good practice would be presenting a trusted copy of the original from a source such as the Archives and then requesting he investigate what was posted on the MFF site....and of course the documents there do come through separate channels including the ARRC. He will have to do some research on that as well as whether the document(s) in question came from multiple sources eg WC, HSCA, via what channel.

I think at this point there are a number of individuals including Barb, Pamela and possibly Dawn who might have some comments on Judyth herself as a source but at least in this case if Rex has some real detail to investigate I'm sure he will make an effort to resolve it.