Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Preview of Larry Hancock's The Tipping Point

 Preview of Larry Hancock's The Tipping Point 

Larry Hancock’s new book The Tipping Point is a concise summary of his many decades long investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. 

[Those who want a taste of The Tipping Point before being tempted to purchase it, you can read key excerpts at the Mary Ferrell web site here: https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Tipping_Point.html ]

I have been following Larry’s work since his landmark Someone Would Have Talked (Updated in 2010), which firmly puts to rest the often repeated and demonstratedly false cliche that if there as a conspiracy to kill the President someone would have talked. They talked all right, and Larry documents numerous cases, each of which leads to the heart of the case.

Since the official deranged lone nut scenario has been proven false, it must have happened another way, and in this book Larry lays out a very believable alternative scenario, one that connects all of the main subjects to Cuba, and defines the essence of a covert intelligence operation, the means by which the conspirators achieved their goal, and got away with it.

The Tipping Point picks up where Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas leaves off, with the President’s head shattered by two almost simultaneous shots, one from the front and one from behind. While Thompson gives a micro analysis of the eyewitness reports, ballistics, medical evidence, and acoustics, fitting them all together without speculating who was behind the triggers, Hancock puts things in their Cuban context, lays out a chronology and gives names to those who are the most likely candidates for pulling off such an audacious triangulation of firepower.

As with the subjects in his Someone Would Have Talked, and as CIA official Rolf Mowatt-Larsen explained in his 2019 CAPA presentation in Dallas, the suspects are limited, limited to those who had the capability to conduct such complex covert intelligence operations, and many of them are the same ones who talked and most are familiar characters to anyone who has studied the murder of the President in even a superficial manner.

James Jesus Angleton ran the CIA counter-inteligence office that kept particularly keen tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, counter-insurgency expert General Ed Lansale, America’s James Bond William Harvey director of the anti-Castro Cuban Task Force W and the case officer for Mafia Don John Rosselli, along with covert cowboy Rip Robertson, all of whom are associated with the CIA’s Miami station JMWAVE, where most of the intirgue stems from.

Besides documenting most of the references to records released under the JFK Act, Hancock refers to the CIA crypt files that translates the codes into English, puts everything into a clear and concise chronololgy, and quotes the suspect themselves as to their participation in the Cuban ops that were turned against JFK at Dealey Plaza.

Besides the usual suspects, Larry brings some relatively new names into the fold – Carl Jenkins and John I.F. Harper, CIA trainers who prepared the Cuban Pathfinders for the Bay of Pigs and later Mongoose commando attacks against Cuba. And Gene Wheaton, Jenkins’ former housemate and proprietor of a CIA airline propriety company. Wheaton tried to blow the whistle on what he knew about renegade CIA operations but  then CIA director William Casey was in on it, and the Assassination Records Review Board didn’t pay him any attention.

Narrowing down the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro to the few that resemble the Dealey Plaza operation, Larry focuses on one particular plot – the Pathfinder Plan. From CIA technicians at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) we learn that Pathfinder was a plan to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban commando snipers into Cuba and shoot Castro in the head with high powered rifles as he rode by in an open jeep.

I pretty much see eye to eye with Larry Hancock, and while we are usually on the same page, Larry always seems to be ahead of me, so I know I will learn something new from anything he writes.

 [https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Tipping_Point_Introduction.html ]

Some excerts:

Reality Check

“…..it had become quite clear, to me at least, that the official history (as portrayed in the Warren Commission Report) of the assassination was simply not credible. That conclusion was based in part on an assessment of the materials offered in support of the Warren Report were questionable in many respects – including the fact that the legal chain of evidence used in support of the report was not only broken, but contained so many questionable elements that an evidentary approach simply did not offer a viable foundation for assessing the crime.”

“Beyond that, the documentary record supported the conclusion that an iterative series of actions had been taken after the assassinationto suppress certain items of evidence, to obfuscate witness testimony, and to preempt any contemporary investigation of conspiracy during the months immediately following the assassination.”

The Back Door

“After fifteen years of my own inquiry into President Kennedy’s murder, I concluded that there had indeed been a conspiracy in play – but that my initial and preferred, evidentiary approach to the crime would remain both frustrating and fruitless. Pursuing a conspiracy by going through the front door was simply not viable.”

“….What we foundwas that irrespective of the individual (we studied) and the lead, to some extent all of them shared some sort of history with the Cuban revoluion of the late 1950s, the rise to power of Fidel Castro, the Cuban resistance to his regime, the various CIA efforts to oust Castro from power or the years-long anti-Castro resistance movement inside Cuba or among Cuban exiles in the United States.”

“Perhaps most startling, not only did all of the sources and associations which seemed most credible connect to Cuba in some fashion, in the end they actually pointed in the same direction that Robert Kennedy appears to have immediately suspected on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.”

The Cuban Backstory

“…Due to its proximity and its long-standing trade relationships with the United States, Cuba was already an area of routine CIA foreign intelligence collections as well as political influence (anti-communist) efforts…..In support of such options the U.S. Army began using commercial covers to secretly place officers inside Cuba to collect military intelligence…..”

The CIA Cuba Project 1960-61

“The initial CIA effort to oust Fidel Castro, approved by President Eisenhower in March, 1960, bailed in its goal to produce well-armed, widespread guerilla action against the Castro regime by the end of October, 1962…”

“Moving dramatically from covert action, the CIA turned to the creation and amphibious landing of a heavily aremed, brigade sized, conventional infantry force – supported by tanks, armored trucks, heavy weapons units and parachute drops as well as by a Cuban volunteer air element.”

BK NOTES: When the original covert insertion of Pathfinder commandos into the east coast mountains was removed from the planning and replaced with the full force brigade, General Ed Lansdale and his Phillipine trainer were removed from the operation.

“It has only been with the release of a body of new information from the CIA’s own internal inquiries and histories as well a great deal of relatively recent oral history work, that we can begin to fully appreciate the disconnnects between the mission as it was directed and understood by President Kennedy, and the actual military operation as it was carried out by (Richard) Bissell and those reporting to him…..”

Covert Action against Cuba 1961-1962

“For the Kennedy administration the year 1962 began with a reset in Cuban affairs. President Kennedy remained committed to action against Cuba, but it was going to be covert action – orchestrated at an interdepartmental level above the CIA. The program would officially begin early in the year, designated Operation Nongoose and headed by a Kennedy appointee rather than a senior CIA officer….Instead the CIA was assigned to a support role, carried out by a relatively small  group designated as Task Force W (headed by William Harvey) and with field operations conducted by the JMWAVE station….”

“Still, a number of the highly trained infiltration cadre that had been originally trained under Carl Jenkins remained operational, although relegated to performing relatively minor missions under officers such as Bay of Pigs veterans Rip Robertson and Grayston Lynch. The paramilitary personnel involved in those missions are of special interest because of the strength of their anti-Castro commitment, and the degree to which they remained militarily active in both sanctioned and unsanctioned efforts against the Castro regime over a number of years.”

Larry and I agree on a number of basic hypothesis. For one, the official story just doesn't hold water, so it must have happened another way. In addition, whatever happened at Dealey Plaza it was a covert intelligence operation that is centered around Cuba, CIA operations against Cuba, and specific CIA-Mafia plans to kill Castro. One of the plans to kill Castro was turned against JFK in Dallas, and the multi-gunman ambush and conspiracy was meant to be transparent, and Castro was to be blamed for it. 

And I think there are others who are working on this case who now think the same - Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, Bill Simpich, Jeff Morley, Malcolm Blunt, Alan Dale and others. 

And every line item is footnoted to the hilt.

Additional Links:

More excerpts from The Tipping Point: JFKCountercoup2: Larry Hancock's The Tipping Point Excerpts

Tipping Point

https://larryhancock.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/cia-pseudonyms-and-aliases/

http://www.larry-hancock.com/documents/index.html

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/pseudodb.php

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php

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