Brent Holland interviews Larry Hancock on his Night Frights Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cnbnjqC4XMI think Brent and Larry do an effective (though occasionally long-winded) job of explaining how the Cold War and the rise of Communism helped to shape the American government's view of the geo-political threats it faced during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It's well worth watching.
One key point stuck out for me in this interview. I'm pretty confident that what follows is self-evident to most of our members. Nonetheless, it was a useful reminder and clarification for me. It may give us all some insight into the alleged claims made by Carlos Marcello on his deathbed, and should help us to avoid getting stuck in the (for me) non-issue of whether or not the Mafia was involved in the assassination.
Hancock was discussing the earliest examples of CIA involvement in regime change and political assassinations during the mid-1950s. Then his talk turned to the use of surrogates in CIA Black Ops:
Surrogate (n), a substitute, especially a person deputising for another in a specific role or office(starting at c. 18'30 mins)
LH: How do you bring about regime change? Well, you have to work with some revolutionaries, some ex-patriots, some exiles ... you know you're not going to do this by just sending in the Marines. You have to find somebody in-country, or close to being in-country, who can be your surrogate. And that is the pattern from then on, for the next fifty years, you have to find surrogates. And you work with them, you tie yourself to them, and to some extent you become wed to what they want to do, because they're going to be the people that really do it. And what we see there is that they immediately propose that the quickest and easiest way to overthrow the regime is to assassinate not only the President of the country, some of his key cadres, some of the key communist supporters in the country. And they come up with a whole list. And the CIA being helpful says, "Well, we have all sorts of intelligence so we'll give you an approved list". So the CIA goes back to them and says "Well, if we really wanted to do this - if YOU really wanted to do this, not we - here's the list". [...] These are the people you need to take out if you're going to make that regime go away. And it proceeds. And the Agency again hands off a lot of this to their surrogates, and they train the people, they put the people in touch with other anti-communist leaders in surrounding countries. [...] One of the things you will never find is this will never be done by CIA officers or CIA employees. Even from the very beginning it doesn't happen that way. This is the essence of
plausible deniability, after all. Yes, sir, we may have been in the area, and sure we know these people, and we may have provided some support to them, but of course we never intended that they would take this step, or use those weapons in the way they did ... blah, blah, blah. Yes, sir, we too are victims in all this.
So, what happens if we apply plausible deniability to the events on November 22, 1963 ...:
(starting at c. 55'0 mins)
BH: Do you think CIA operatives were in Dealey Plaza that day and did they pull the trigger?
LH: CIA officers never pull the trigger. CIA officers never pull the trigger. That's right. CIA employees never pull the trigger. It couldn't be deniable if they did, that's not the way ... The paradigm that's in place for 30-40 years is in place there. Might there be a CIA officer in Dallas? You bet. Is he the person with the weapon? No way. It just doesn't work that way.
BH: They would outsource it again.(N.B. Transcripts not verbatim.)
The interesting thing about all this is that [1] the true initiator of the project (e.g. the CIA, although other options exist) can truthfully deny that they assassinated President Kennedy whilst [2] the surrogate (e.g. the Mob, although other options exist) can truthfully claim that they did! In fact, both are playing to their own agendas and neither is being entirely truthful.
Any claim that the Mafia was involved in the assassination is irrelevant to the achievement of our stated objectives. Discuss.
Edit: definition moved up
