Gerry Patrick Hemming discusses E Howard Hunt

[Paul Brancato]

Hemming loved the attention I am sure. Greg, since you interviewed him at length, did you ever ask him about George Bush? What is your assessment of him? Did he provide useful information?

Paul - as I have notes many times, your focus on Walker as a person of interest is appreciated by me. But even you would have to admit you are more wedded to your theory than any of the other posters, and nearly always bring the subject of your posts back to it. But then you say things that are surmises as if they are fact. Seriously, the idea that several plots were in effect, and that various plotters remained confused after the hit as to whether it was the hit team they supported that actually did the deed, is just a guess on your part, designed to fit the notion that all those haters must have sent teams to Dealey plaza that day on a need to know basis. There are much simpler explanations. Maybe there were multiple hit teams, but you are just guessing, and stating it as fact. Could you try to engage in discussion without promoting your theory above all others, without mentioning Walker and Dean and Hall in nearly every post? You tend to start by giving some credence to the post you are responding to, but the ending is nearly always a repetition of your own theory.

[Greg Burnham]

Gerry provided very useful information and it got better over time. The interviews that I've posted thus far were relatively early in our relationship (late 90's and one from 2000). When I first interviewed him I did so from a position of assuming his guilt; that he was somehow involved in the assassination. I haven't posted any of those because the exchanges were generally caustic, filled with expletives on both sides, dripping with disdain from me and sarcasm from him. They are not very helpful. However, I persisted in questioning him and he continued to tell me his story. Gradually I began to see a very complex man, indeed. As time went on I became less and less convinced that he was complicit in this crime and, much like my friend, Noel Twyman (Bloody Treason), was greatly impressed by the sheer volume, as well as the depth and breadth of his knowledge. It was truly encyclopedic. His memory was nearly perfect on a vast number of subjects. He simply never forgot anything--including details about my own life that I shared with him. Even small things that I mentioned to him in passing he remembered in detail years later--without referring to notes.

As for George Bush, all I will say for now is that Gerry didn't hold many politicians in high esteem...perhaps none. And some he had no use for at all. But, as a former Marine, Gerry was politically neutral. As he once said, "A Marine doesn't give a flying f*** who's in the White House. He only cares about the code and the guy next to him in the trenches."

That just about sums it up.

[Paul Trejo]

Paul - as I have notes many times, your focus on Walker as a person of interest is appreciated by me. But even you would have to admit you are more wedded to your theory than any of the other posters, and nearly always bring the subject of your posts back to it. But then you say things that are surmises as if they are fact. Seriously, the idea that several plots were in effect, and that various plotters remained confused after the hit as to whether it was the hit team they supported that actually did the deed, is just a guess on your part, designed to fit the notion that all those haters must have sent teams to Dealey plaza that day on a need to know basis. There are much simpler explanations. Maybe there were multiple hit teams, but you are just guessing, and stating it as fact. Could you try to engage in discussion without promoting your theory above all others, without mentioning Walker and Dean and Hall in nearly every post? You tend to start by giving some credence to the post you are responding to, but the ending is nearly always a repetition of your own theory.

Well, Paul B., I keep driving the subject back to General Walker because I think that it's insufficiently addressed by the literature.

However -- I don't regard the guilt of General Walker to be an established fact. It's not a fact, it's a theory. It's a working theory, that keeps getting stronger every year -- but it's still unproven.

Also, the idea that several plots were in effect is not my idea -- it was stated by Gerry Patrick Hemming, who said that lots of people paid money to braggarts who promised to kill JFK. Then, after the deed was done, how could a donor be sure that his donation wasn't the MAIN donation? That's the reason that Hemming refused to name names -- too many paranoid donors were still out there.

Also, we have DOCUMENTED evidence about a Tampa plot, a Chicago plot, a Miami plot, a Dallas Trade Mart plot, and that's only a few. So, it's really no guess on my part.

Not only that, but Jim Garrison himself suspected that there were multiple plots. Remember that video?

So, I'm only repeating existing JFK research that's already out there. It might be wrong -- but the facts tend to support it. There were hundreds if not thousands of people who wanted JFK dead.

Finally -- why would I talk about something else besides my own theory which I am keen to pursue to the end -- to see if it's right or wrong?

You yourself keep raising your own theory that Bush Sr. was involved. Don't you want to pursue it to the end?

If you want to talk about your theory -- fine. I see it as purely guesswork -- and I find that younger researchers pursue it because they don't remember JFK anyway, the Cuban Crises means nothing to them, and anyway Bush Sr. dominated their political horizons from childhood into adulthood.

In my view, the evidence shows that George Bush Sr. was a wealthy businessman who lived in Houston in 1963, with lots of Dallas business connections, and he sent the FBI a report that a local citizen in Houston (James Parrott) threatened to kill JFK if he got near him.

That doesn't fit the profile of somebody who wanted to kill JFK. The JBS was behind the deed, by all political evidence, and George Bush Sr. was nowhere near the profile of a member of the JBS.

That's clear, IMHO.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited July 15, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Greg Burnham]

OK, so Greg Burnham won't further elaborate on his comment from two days ago, namely:

"Why do you think there are files being withheld? Because the American People will scream about us NOT attacking Castro. Watch how fast the files are freed once Castro passes away. Tick tock tick tock..."

So, I'll turn the topic back to Gerry Patrick Hemming and his various and sometimes contradictory opinions.

One of those contradictory opinions was stated in the context of this thread, namely, the Plotters would never use hot-headed Cuban Exiles or rightist mercenaries when they had impartial professionals at their disposal.

In other words, to identify the shooters themselves, we should look away from Cuban Exiles and rightist mercenaries (who would have been too emotionally involved to be trusted) and look toward paid professionals only, presumably those without a political position on JFK.

In that regard we should also recall that Gerry Patrick Hemming was the leader of a mercenary organization named, Interpen, which consisted largely of hot-headed Cuban Exiles and rightist mercenaries.

But what is most important in this context is the fact that Gerry Patrick Hemming contradicted his 2001 statement in his 1974 interview with Dick Russell (ARGOSY Magazine). Here's an excerpt from that interview:

--------------------------- BEGIN Excerpt - 1974 ARGOSY Interview --------------------

ARGOSY: Do you think it's possible that the Kennedy killing involved some of the Cuban exile community?

HEMMING: Yes, very possible. It wasn't that hard a job. I've seen and been on the scene for harder jobs than what happened in Dealey Plaza. You had a hard core of characters in the Dallas Police and County Sheriff's Department that would blow somebody's head off at a whisper. When you've got people running around who have friendships with organized crime, Federal agencies, and have been in bed with so many people – well, when the assassination goes down, everybody's covering their tracks.

ARGOSY: Can you be specific about the offers you received to kill Kennedy?

HEMMING: Look, there are people who didn't have a goddamn thing to do with it, but they think they did because they were conned by other people. If they think somebody's gonna point the finger at them, they're gonna get 'em. And I'd like to stay alive.

ARGOSY: You told the Senate investigators that you believed in 1963 that Loran [Lorenzo] Hall was somehow involved. [Hall, an ex-CIA contract employee, right-wing politico and trainer of Cuban exiles for a Cuban invasion, was named by the Warren Commission as one of three men who may have been in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963.]

HEMMING: Yes, the day of the assassination, I made a call to Texas from Miami. And I pointedly asked, is Lorenzo Hall in Dallas? I made the call about 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon. He was there. My contact had seen him in Dallas the day before.

ARGOSY: Why were you suspicious of Lorenzo Hall?

HEMMING: Because he left Miami with the stated intent to get Kennedy. And he had my weapon, a Johnson 30.06 breakdown rifle with a scope on it that had been prepared for the Bay of Pigs. I'd left it with a private investigator who had previously worked under CIA Agency auspices on the West Coast. Hall got the weapon when we ran short of funds on a return trip from L.A. to Florida, and we ended up using Hall's car.

ARGOSY: You were working closely with Hall?

HEMMING: He came out to work with our group in 1963. Then he ran afoul with some people, and immediately went to work with a group that I thought was infiltrated by Castro's agents. Hall ignored this. He siphoned off a couple of people who had worked with me in the past, and started organizing his own operation with Frank Sturgis and some other guys.

ARGOSY: Hall left Miami again shortly before the assassination? Could you be more specific about his plans?

HEMMING: He was gonna stop and look up a number of people. Some he'd met through me, others when he was in Cuba in 1959. One was Santo Traficante's brother in St. Peter, and some others who operated under Meyer Lansky's auspices. And there were still other connections in Louisiana and Texas that had expressed an interest.

ARGOSY: In eliminating Kennedy?

HEMMING: Yes.

ARGOSY: And you believe Hall was directly involved...?

HEMMING: He knew how to do the job. We'd discussed various techniques as part of our schooling-techniques required for Havana, Port-au-Prince and other Latin American jobs. But I think somebody was trying to put him there [Dallas] so he'd be one of the patsies.

--------------------------- END Excerpt - 1974 ARGOSY Interview --------------------

Knowing that Loran Hall was a rightist mercenary, working closely with Cuban Exiles inside Cuba at first, and then in several paramilitary raids on Cuba after he escaped from a Cuban prison, we see the obvious contradiction.

Obviously, the direction of this interview points in the exact opposite direction of the interview that Gerry Patrick Hemming gave Greg Burnham a quarter-century later.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

Paul,

Here's an excerpt from HEMMING to RUSSELL regarding Loran Hall:

Russell: You were working closely with Hall?

HEMMING: He came to work with our group in 1963. Then he ran afoul with some people and immediately went to work with a group that I thought was infiltrated by Castro's agents. Hall ignored this. He siphoned off a couple of people who had worked with me in the past, and started organizing his own operation with FRANK STURGIS and some other guys...He knew how to do the job...But I think someone was trying to put him there so he would be one of the patsies."

HEMMING 1994: "After the thing went down, I called Lester Logue. Lester, having been a big guy in Republican politics, started making calls. I said, 'Did Loran show up there?' Logue says, 'Yeah, he was here yesterday.' I said, 'That son-of-a-bitch has got my xxxxing rifle, I don't know if he's part of this xxxx. If he shows up on your doorstep blow his xxxxing head off, cause he's come to kill you.' Hall could have ended up in the xxxxin' school book depository himself. He was another xxxxin' OSWALD being led down the path. Being put into position where he could have taken a fall. A fall guy."

[Paul Trejo]

Paul,

Here's an excerpt from HEMMING to RUSSELL regarding Loran Hall:

Russell: You were working closely with Hall?

HEMMING: He came to work with our group in 1963. Then he ran afoul with some people and immediately went to work with a group that I thought was infiltrated by Castro's agents. Hall ignored this. He siphoned off a couple of people who had worked with me in the past, and started organizing his own operation with FRANK STURGIS and some other guys...He knew how to do the job...But I think someone was trying to put him there so he would be one of the patsies."

HEMMING 1994: "After the thing went down, I called Lester Logue. Lester, having been a big guy in Republican politics, started making calls. I said, 'Did Loran show up there?' Logue says, 'Yeah, he was here yesterday.' I said, 'That son-of-a-bitch has got my xxxxing rifle, I don't know if he's part of this xxxx. If he shows up on your doorstep blow his xxxxing head off, cause he's come to kill you.' Hall could have ended up in the xxxxin' school book depository himself. He was another xxxxin' OSWALD being led down the path. Being put into position where he could have taken a fall. A fall guy."

Thanks, Greg, for the citation.

This interview suggests to me that Gerry Patrick Hemming regarded Loran Hall as having some role in the JFK murder, but Hemming didn't know exactly what role that was. (This suggests that Hemming was at most a low-level player in the JFK murder.)

Hemming knew that Loran Hall had Hemming's 30-06 rifle, and that he took it to Dallas. The way Loran Hall got the rifle is that only a few weeks beforehand, Hemming and Hall were driving in Hemming's car together on a cross-country trip, probably a gun-running trip, and Hemming's car broke down. At that point Hemming relied on Loran Hall to provide another car. At this point Hemming became indebted to Loran Hall.

To pay for trip expenses, Gerry Patrick Hemming went into a pawn shop along with Loran Hall, and hocked his 30-06 rifle. Then, just a matter of days before the JFK murder, Loran Hall went back to the pawn shop on his own, and redeemed the rifle from hock. The pawn-broker gave Hall the rifle, remembering Hall's participation when the rifle was hocked.

This is all a matter of record. Hemming knew that Loran Hall took the rifle to Dallas with him, and he was enraged, because Hemming feared that the rifle could be make Hemming himself into the patsy for the JFK murderI (Hemming was hyper-aware that a rifle was going to be used to finger the patsy. That's how close Hemming was to the action in the JFK murder.)

So, that explains the rage and hatred and foul language in the interview with Dick Russell that you cited above, Greg.

Yet it also explains a few other things. Hemming and Hall were not always enemies. They shared rides together. They shared cars together. They hocked weapons together. They were seen together, working in cooperation, only a few weeks before the JFK murder.

(We know this is true because we have FBI reports soon after the JFK murder that FBI Agents investigated exactly that rifle! How in the world did they get that rifle? Well, it didn't matter because in another day the FBI ceased seeking any accomplices of Lee Harvey Oswald, because J. Edgar Hoover so ordered that stoppage.)

Hemming and Hall had worked together in Interpen, and possibly before that, as early as 1959 in Cuba, fighting alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevarra, to topple the corrupt Batista regime. (This was also the time when Harry Dean was supporting Fidel Castro -- before Castro came out in daylight as a Communist.)

Both Hemming and Hall were sought or detained by Castro in the backlash, and somehow escaped from Cuba.

So, even though after the JFK murder they tended to say only bad things about each other, we should not get the idea that they were always enemies -- on the contrary, they worked with each other closely for years. It is interesting that after the JFK murder they refused to say anything kind about the other. Loran Hall flew into a rage with one reporter and called Gerry Patrick Hemming a Communist -- and claimed he couldn't remember his full name. That might have been mere theatrics -- meant to throw people off the scent.

So, Gerry Patrick Hemming thought of Loran Hall as having some role in the JFK murder -- or at least being very close to the JFK murderers and the action. Yet we should remember that Hemming also confessed to A.J. Weberman that he himself also took a lower-level role in the JFK murder.

Remember that Hemming confessed that he called Lee Harvey Oswald from Florida on the day before the JFK murder, and offered Oswald double the market price for his Manlicher-Carcano rifle, if he would only bring it to the Texas School Book Depository Building on the morning of 22 November 1963, and leave it between some packages on the sixth floor -- so that his underworld friend could pick it up anonymously. (Hemming knew Oswald was always hard up for cash.)

This was the specific and final act that made Lee Harvey Oswald a patsy. Gerry Patrick Hemming admitted to being the one to make that phone call.

So -- here we have two former members of Interpen -- Hemming and Hall -- and they were both moving closely within the circles of the JFK murder. So I feel pretty certain that here we have part of the ground-crew.

Finally, I would emphasize, both Hemming and Hall knew Ex-General Edwin Walker, and even visited him at his home in Dallas.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited July 25, 2014 by Paul Trejo