Night Fright interview

Just a note to let those interested know that Brent Holland has just posted a rather lengthy interview that he and I did on the subject of the CIA and political assassination. I’ll include the link below for those who might want to listen. Basically the interview is an extended discussion of the research I covered in NEXUS.  Brent is a great interviewer and its always a pleasure to chat with him.  We started this one out with an opportunity for me to comment on the fact that my research on actual CIA involvement with executive action and assassinations is generally quite different than what ends up in the movies. That’s interesting because it also gives researchers a type of benchmark to evaluate lots of the unsolicited and sensational stories that turn up about such things.  As a general rule, if you really want “deniable” political murders and if you want to maintain legal distance, the last thing you want is to hire some mysterious contract killer who will get away seamlessly and leave everybody wondering who did it.  You want somebody local  right there with an obvious motive, willing to take the heat for some cause of their own if they get caught. They you can say, “hey, I talked to those guys and I may have sympathized with their cause but I never ordered them to kill anybody!”.

The more I write about covert intelligence and covert warfare activities, the more I get depressed by much of what appears as purported factual information on the internet – much of it clearly spun to political agendas and tightly wound worldviews. There are folks writing about contemporary events that just have no clue at all of the reality or the history behind them.  No doubt as I move this blog more towards the subject of my upcoming book,” Shadow Wars”, that’s going to lead me to incur certain types of wraith – but hey, Gerry Hemming once advised me to “watch my six” and I assured him I have a 360 field of fire.

If you want to listen to me yammer along about the way in which the CIA really did connect to various political assassinations during the Cold War, take a look at this link,  Larry

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cnbnjqC4XM&feature=youtu.be&a

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whispers

 

I wanted to share an very informative article just prepared for posting by my friend Rex Bradford.  The article is taken from a presentation Rex gave at a Lancer conference in 2008 and is the sort of overview work that we truly to see brought forth for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  I should note that Rex is doing the same sort of overview for this November’s conference, focusing on the period following the assassination. He will address the obfuscation which occurred during what was supposed to be an open investigation of the murder – but which we now know was something a good bit different.

Rex’s piece, just published online, deals with remarks and insights from those individuals who know or felt there was something more to the assassination than you would find in the Warren Commission report. Overall it gives a quite chilling view of what people did not want to face up to, including people in a position to have some very legitimate concerns. It definitely should be shared with as many people as possible as we move forward to November.

Whispers from A Silent Generation,  Rex Bradford

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Essay_-_Whispers_from_the_Silent_Generation

– Larry

 

Lancer Conference plus

As mentioned, I’m afraid I will be blogging only infrequently for a couple of months as we go through the edit process on the new covert warfare book – the publisher would like to have it out in January and that means a lot of work right now. I did want to mention that I will be going on internet radio with Jeff Bushman against this evening, for a full hour.  It will be live at 8 pm Central at

 http://www.GoingBeyondRadio.com.

but its archived for anyone who wants to check in later.  I’ll be on for a full hour this evening.  I also wanted to give everyone a bit of an update on the JFK Lancer Conference coming up in November.

The conference will be considerably larger this year, both in terms of length and number of participants -  you can find the details on the JFK Lancer web site – we began receiving requests to participate in the 2013 conference last November and have been working on reviewing proposals and scheduling since the end of last year.  The focus of this conference is on taking a new look at the evidence officially presented against Lee Oswald as the shooter and sole participant in the crime. We have a number of professionals lined up to address the forensics and ballistics evidence, presenting what has been learned including considerable information that was either filtered or simply not presented to the official investigations.  We will also have critiques of each of the official investigations based on what has been revealed by the past 50 years of research, in particular the new information surfaced beginning in the 1990′s with a vast amount of oral history work and document releases.

In addition a number of speakers will be offering brand new research, literally never presented previously. If anyone thinks that nothing new exists on the case – well the conference should dispel that notion. We always try to maintain a real balance in the conference participants, covering the range of interests without too much redundancy and also offering the attendees the chance for personal dialogs with authors they have read or specialists the have read about – of course nobody will agree with all the information presented but its good to remember that nobody every learns much new by only talking to people with whom you already agree.

To elaborate on that point, one of the things going on at this years conference will be a number of focus group discussions on a wide variety of topics.  We have recruited researchers specializing in those subjects to moderate the focus groups and Debra Conway has obtained a separate conference room for that.  She has also organized cash breakfast and lunch buffets so that attendees will have to option of eating while listening to and participating in some of the structured discussions.  That is going to be important this year given the crowds expected in Dallas and the lines at restaurants, etc. Beyond that we will be running conference activities from around 8 am in the morning to 9 pm each evening.  If you are coming, rest up in advance as we will be keeping you quite busy.

A final point on Dallas this November, I know some folks are concerned about access to the Plaza. Debra has pursued that issue with the Mayors office for months, starting last year. Although its pretty clear that Dallas still has some work to do and decisions to make about the crowds at its official ceremony, we have been assured that once that is over, the Plaza will be open to the public on November 22.  And of course our normal walking tour of the Plaza area will be a couple of days later on Sunday, so attendees should have no concern about access to the Plaza during their time in Dallas.

 

– Larry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FBI Reports

 

My apologies for being gone for a time from the blog – but I do have good news!  My covert warfare book has been accepted by a publisher and should go into edit this coming month. The goal is to have it in print and available by Jan/Feb 2014.  With that and preparations for the 50th Anniversary Lancer conference in Dallas, things have been and will be pretty hectic this year.

For the moment though, I wanted to offer some observations to those who spent a lot of time reading and dealing with FBI reports. I gained a lot of exposure to FBI reporting practices in JFK research but far more when Stu Wexler and I began to tackle the King assassination.  Our pursuit of reports in that case has been exhaustive and it has also given us the opportunity to compare “practices” at several levels of the Bureau. Of course all that applies to the Hoover era so generalizing to current day would be risky, but it is truly amazing how “political” the Bureau was under Hoover. It’s also amazing how constantly senior officers buckled to Hoover’s comments, we encountered little sign there was ever any push-back once Hoover made notes on or sent a memo back to the field. His subordinates immediately abandoned all the facts they had presented and turned 180 degrees. An amazing example occurred early in Hoover’s relationship with Dr. King.  A senior Bureau officer prepared an extensive report pointing out that there was no true Communist influence on King; Hoover challenged him, the officer flipped totally and later Hoover commended him in writing for coming to his senses.

The same sort of “structuring” of evidence in regard to senior Bureau positions and prosecutions can also be found with FBI Lab work and I remain puzzled as to why more researchers don’t discuss that in regard to the JFK case.  Anyone interested in that subject should read the the work of the two authors mentioned in the link below…their books are major works on how the lab lines up evidence for cases being prosecuted rather than simply performs objective studies:

Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The Fbi Crime Lab

In my own reading of Bureau reports, a number of things stand out.  First is the difference between reports prepared by field office SAIC’s and HQ officers as compared to actual working agent reports. Both types of higher level reports are very much summary reports and often obviously driven by the angles which HQ is pursuing, especially once Hoover has closed down an open ended investigation to focus on a suspect and building a case. And its pretty clear Hoover rushed to that stage as soon as possible, for Bureau image purposes.

Once a suspect has been named, little time was spent on leads not going in that direction and often very superficial inquiry was used to close off the lead. Virtually any excuse would do. In the King case Stu and I saw instances of the Bureau closing off an accessory lead simply because the individual in question was a “respected” local business person, in others they closed them down by stating the whereabouts of the suspects was known on the day of the crime…but after cutting a level lower in the reports we found that might simply mean that the suspects car was seen in their driveway, the light was on in their house, or that an Agent had simply seen them in town that day or even that week.  An example of that is found in a SAIC  level report that cleared Milteer from being in Dallas; much later the agent actually in charge of his surveillance stated they might check his whereabouts once a week or once every two weeks….certainly they did not know where he was on the dates around Nov. 22.  I have to say that we have found little evidence of Agents literally or consciously reporting false information, but the extent to which a report can be managed by selective inclusion and selective wording is quite amazing. More frequently its what is left unsaid, unexplored or unchallenged that leaves you shaking  your head.

It also becomes clear that the Bureau’s view of a crime was that if an suspect was not  at the scene of the crime, they could be written off….the concept of accessories and conspiracy simply did not come into play. Beyond that, their questioning techniques were often, to say the least, blunt.  In many cases they clearly warned other suspects by questioning them about informant remarks while the inquiry was in full play – and simply recorded the suspects denials, moving on to other tasks. You find very little speculation about such things, what you do find is a consistent pattern of HQ or SAIC’s stating that lines of inquiry must be followed and issues resolved – but in practice, they simply fade away over time at the field level if the lead cannot be connected to the primary target of the investigation/pending prosecution.

In a broader sense it also appears their were two sorts of leads in play, and the difference in the two has a major impact in both inquiry and reporting  – if it was a lead pertaining to HQ direction or the focus of a declared “principal suspect”, they dug deeply, sometimes agonizingly deeply, in support of building a case.  But if it was a lead from the public, from an informant or actually any source that brought in something tangential to where HQ was going, the practice was often to investigate very superficially.

One final remark, in regard to unsolicited information, you often find Bureau reports very literally stating information from newspaper articles, from other agencies, from informants for just “friends of the Bureau.” In those reports, Agents are simply writing down the information as stated to them, most reports of any sort contain much in the way of analysis or assessment. A very good way to get in trouble with superiors was to say too much; better to be very brief and as factual as possible – agents did get written up on their report writing.  But what that means is that  you often find some really far out stuff in Bureau reports – but just because its in a report doesn’t mean that the Bureau investigated it or in any way endorsed it, they were simply “reporting” it.  You can bet what a field agent really thought about any particular source report might have been a good deal different than what was literally being described.  And agents were not encouraged to give commentary on such reports, that was left for higher levels or more often simply for the Director’s comment or direction.

– Larry

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Bird Airport

I’ve posted here previously on Red Bird and recently Jim DiEugenio invited me to prepare a short summary paper on certain of the leads and issues pertaining to events reported there.  Debra Conway was nice enough to add some illustrations for those who may not easily visualize the airport’s location.  I won’t repeat anything from it here but if you wish to take a look you can find it on the CTKA web site.

http://www.ctka.net/2013/Hancock_Redbird.html

I also want to note credit to all of  Matthew Smith’s primary work on Red Bird issues, with Wayne January. Fortunately I’ve  had a number of occasions to discuss it with Matthew, both in Dallas at Lancer conferences and by phone and email.  He has always been most generous in sharing information.

Addendum:

It’s been brought to my attention that I left something out of the article that certainly deserves mention so I’ll note it here.  I do mention that the FBI learned about Ray January from a local source, he did not go to them with  his story (either one of them).  They became aware of it because after mentioning a visit by people wishing to rent an air plane for a flight to Mexico to some friends, the story was actually picked up in a news item on UPI.  The FBI became aware of January from that.  The issue with the UPI article is that it gives the date of the visit to the airport as summer, not immediately before the assassination.  That is the same date that shows up in the FBI report on January.  January himself, when shown his report, stated that the visit had been only days before the assassination, not months before – which puts him at odds with both the UPI story and the date in the FBI report and that disconnect raises issues about his credibility as a witness.  Unfortunately, it is not FBI practice to collect first hand written statements from witnesses nor to have them review and sign off on the FBI reports themselves (which are sometimes a consolidation of various information).   So did the FBI get it wrong?   Did January get it wrong (and why would he introduce an issue which would hurt his own credibility he he was not sincere about getting the story right?).   Did the FBI change the date on purpose?  Or could it be something as simple as they writing a report which used the date from their initial information, the UPI story?    Problem is we will never know for sure – but it is important to have all elements of the story in place for everyone to reach their own conclusions.  Thanks to Greg Parker for keeping me straight..   Larry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Larry

Angleton

Sherry Feister’s recent blog post on James Angleton prompted me to do a post on some of the things that made Angleton and his era within the CIA quite unique – and which illustrate the fact that truly investigating the Agency on any particular subject can be virtually impossible . Well that and the issue of “soft file” plus the seemingly routine practice of project leaders to order their staff never to put certain subjects into official communications or at best obscure them even from headquarters with alternative terminology…but I digress.

Some of what made Angleton and his activities unique was the CIA Director level decision to totally compartmentalize counter intelligence from the rest of Agency operations. One can argue the logic of that all day long but during Angleton’s tenure, Agency directors seem to have consistently endorsed Angleton’s priority on hunting for Soviet penetrations of American intelligence – instead of the reverse.  During the transition after his termination, senior officers were amazed to find that there had been no similar CI priority on penetrating the Soviets and that Angleton’s touted overseas contacts all had to do with searches for Soviet moles or assets within Western countries (and he thought he had found plenty) rather than efforts to penetrate the Soviets. That was largely left up to the Soviet desk and they had little good to say about  Mr. Angleton.  After an intensive debrief and internal inquirer, senior staff were also aghast at not turning up a single CI/CIA operation against the Soviets and even more so by being unable to determine a single real, active  mole that his activities had every detected.  I go into a lot of that in Chapter 14 of NEXUS but there is a huge amount of “legendary” material written on Angleton which is simply not true. For an anecdote I would strongly recommend Tom Mangold’s book Cold Warrior.   If your view of Angleton is from material on the internet or in JFK books, it could well be very dated and very wrong.

So, from our perspective (rather than the Agencies’) what makes Mr. Angleton such problem.  Well the first point is that Angleton was allowed to set up and maintain a completely separate filing system outside the main CIA system; all within his own offices and safes. Which means none of that was ever seen by any Congressional inquiry and indeed, after his departure when the Agency had to drill open his safes, no record of the content was ever made or released.  The material was apparently just destroyed….?  The second is that Angeleton was allowed to have his own communications network, his own CIA staff contacts in major overseas offices such as Mexico City and even to assign his own project code names outside the Agency system. Which means only his people could really tell you what was going on – and it appears that in many cases they really didn’t know either.  When his subordinates were asked to list out active CIA/CIA projects at the time of his departure, they either could not or would not name any, none at all…..

As if that were not enough, due to the leeway given Angleton by the Directors, he had a great deal of operational freedom, much more than comparable senior officers. He could even use his own sources, foreign contacts or apparently certain crime connected individuals,  at his own discretion. A significant illustration of that is the fact that Angleton used certain of his personal international assets to cover William Harvey’s back inside Cuba during the Castro assassination project – and was personally involved with Harvey on that effort, at least to some unknown extent.

Basically Angleton had the ability to insert himself into any operation which he found interesting and was required to give no formal reports or operate under any sort of oversight.  That would include any domestic intelligence that he decided to conduct against either domestic political figures or foreign nationals.  An example of that, other than the intelligence collection he seems to have been doing in regard to certain of JFK’s friends and associates, comes out of the domestic action which Johnson ordered against the anti Vietnam war effort.  We have fairly extensive details of the dirty tricks the FBI played, but know relatively little about what Mr. Angleton did with his side of the assignment (and if you believe that he restricted himself to American students traveling overseas, I have a bridge for sale).

Bottom line, we all know how hard it is to find out what the Agency was doing at any point in time, Congress wrestled with that again and again. But if you thought that was a challenge, Angleton’s activities were truly similar to a black hole, nothing ever came out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another World

 

In discussing not only the JFK assassination but other history of the era, we are all frequently frustrated by the extent to which the establishment media seems to simply have repeated official story lines – even when some of their on reporters held information which might have challenged it. For example we now know that Life Magazine conducted a secret JFK inquiry after the Warren Commission report was issued, and pursued a number of interesting open leads – especially on Oswald in New Orleans. Wallace Millam even found archived files from that inquiry.

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/32nd_Issue/holland.html

There is a tendency to view such media control as reflecting the hidden hand if the CIA and in many instances that can be shown to be true.  Still, a broader view reveals that in many instances it was simply an artifact if the Cold War worldview.  It must be especially difficult for non-baby boomers to accept that for some two decades, the press often did restrain itself from stories dealing with national security, or in some instances stories which might do no more than create diplomatic problems or just make America “look bad” to the world.

An interesting incident from 1958 to illustrates that point; one related to something as innocent as the International Geophysical Year.  During that international effort countries around the world were sharing a variety of atmospheric and other observations.  Some were coming from the first satellites to be launched by Russia and the United States. But during that same period the U.S. also conducted a series of large scale atomic tests, including high altitude shots to test certain theories related to missile detection and interception. The results of the explosions were detected by a variety of international observations but the government wanted to keep the atomic tests themselves from being officially acknowledged.

Reporters for no less a media giant than the New York Times were all over the atomic testing – project Argus – and knew that the IGY community would be announcing and discussing the observations that revealed the tests. Ultimately the reporters took the their scoop the paper’s publisher, president and managing editor. The response they received was that the paper would print nothing “which would do the country harm.”  The White House would be notified and if they ame back with a negative response the story would not see print.

In this instance the White House failed to respond at all – but after publication the Deputy Secretary of /Defense chided the paper, saying the government ought to control the timing of such information.  This whole story is presented in Chapter 8 of Walter Sullivan’s book, “Assault on the Unknown”. It’s certainly seems a far from today’s media practices – something from another world.  And it makes one wonder if we really know all there is to know about calls from LBJ to Henry Luce after the assassination.

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/LBJ_Phone_Calls

 

Radio interview delayted until March 27

My apologies to anyone who was primed to listen but I was just notified by Jeff that we have to postpone the first of the shows to March 27.  It seems that the technical folks that control the server used in the internet broadcast changed the server controls without any notification or any instructions.  That pretty much did in all the shows scheduled until those involved figure out the changes.

– our apologies, but Jeff is resetting appearances to start on March 27,   Larry

March Radio Interviews

For those interested, I’ll be chatting with my friend Jeff Bushman on his nighttime internet talk radio show on the evenings of March 13 and March 27.  The show airs at 9 pm Eastern and I’ll be going on at the half hour mark. It’s been awhile since we talked; both NEXUS and The Awful Grace of God have been published since then so I expect that our conversation will cover the gamut – I also imagine it will take to the second show to get into my new study of American covert warfare but you never know.  Jeff is a great host and very knowledgeable; I always enjoy our conversations.

You can listen into Jeff’s show by selected it from the offerings at Going Beyond Radio:

http://www.GoingBeyondRadio.com.

 

 

 

 

First Day Evidence

I’ve been doing some reading recently on the reliability of witness testimony, an issue that has fragmented our research for decades.  For reference on the subject, I would heartily recommend Sherry Fiester’s new book   Enemy of the Truth – which contains a detailed professional analysis of just what you can and cannot expect from ear and eye witnesses. Sherry draws on her career in criminology and forensics for this and we really need to pay attention to her.

But beyond what we can expect from first hand witnesses, the other major issue is the time factor. In one classroom study, the instructor staged an impromptu incident and asked his class to record what they had seen happen over the course of a minute or so.  The incident actually involved someone running in and firing a gun at the instructor, with blanks – well hey, data is good but you need to stay around for the study. The students immediately recorded their impressions and the results were actually quite good in terms of accuracy and similarity of observations.  However, when asked to write down their observations within only a week of time passing, all sorts of changes began to show up – number of shots fired, dialog heard, and the clothing of the instructor and assailant. Not only did the individual descriptions start to change significantly but there was no longer general agreement among the witnesses.

In 1986 a psychology instructor performed a similar experiment following the Challenger disaster, a test of what is referred to as “flashbulb” memory. He then filed their responses for three years and repeated the same questions with the students.  In comparing the two sets of responses, a quarter of the class did not have a single memory a year later that matched their initial response.  In some instances students became quite irate, admitting that there was an issue but aggressively defending their current memory over their original statements.

Clearly this must be a caution for all historical research.  While many of us have long stressed first day evidence, we should probably be more candid about first day memories. We have a host of interviews with witness beginning days, weeks, months and years later.  The real question is if they were not on record as of Nov 22 or possibly Nov 23, can we really rely on them, especially without some sort of independent corroboration?

– Larry

PS…the Challenger study was done at Emory University by Professor Ulric Neisser