As I mentioned in an earlier posts, a number of people have been working really hard at developing a new a section on the Mary Ferrell Foundation WEB site – a section to address pseudonyms and aliases.
That work is a major addition to the existing series of Cryptonyms already on the site. We hope this resource will be valuable to anyone researching in CIA documents obtained both from the Mary Ferrell Foundation archives, as well as other major online document repositories.
Pseudonyms and Aliases are a truly tricky area because both involve what appear to be real names and on occasion, even with in the documents, the usage appears to have been blurred.
Normally the distinction is obvious, pseudonyms for internal use and aliases for external. That allows you to make the call as to which which based on usage – the text usually talks about an alias being used in meetings or activities outside the agency, not just in documents.
Of course to be useful, serious aliases need to involve more than just a one time fake name use, they require employment and education covers, work histories, mail backstops and even “pocket litter” carried during field work.
So for all of you who actually dig into documents, we hope this new reference (which will be expanded and likely corrected on some names) will serve as a valuable resource. You can find it at this link:
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/pseudodb.php
Larry Hancock 
This post got me wondering, has any research ever been done on Oswald’s alias of Alec Hidell?
The FBI did a considerable amount of investigation – on the Hidell name itself and his use of it in regards to the FPCC while he was in New Orleans. It took them some time to work out that it was not a second person and that he had made it up himself. You find those FBI inquiry reports from the NO office work and actually copied to the 112th in Texas given that they had turned up some of the first FPCC information on him. There really is not too much to research beyond that point other than what made him pick the name – for that Dick Russell has written a good deal about the possibility that Richard Case Nagell influenced him in that selection…you find that in Dick’s book and I may mention a bit of that in Someone Would Have Talked.