Tag: GEORGE H W BUSH

  • Master Class with John Hankey, IV: Corson, Trento, Hankey, and Their Zhou En-Lies


    The frustrating thing about being a writer is sometimes things don’t make the final cut. Such was the case when I wrote up a mini article for Jim DiEugenio to use in his review of Dark Legacy. I recall; I sent it to him after the horse had bolted. This was not helped by my decision to exclude it in my second article “Onward and Downward With John Hankey.

    I had wanted to expand on a point made by Jim during his Murder Solved forum back and forth with John Hankey (JH) (a very revealing insight into his solipsistic mind). One of the angles Hankey has used to stump his “Prescott Bush the real power of the CIA” myth is the CIA’s 1955 attempt on the life of Chinese leader Zhou Enlai (for background on the CIA’s operation against EnLai click here). He believes Prescott Bush (PB) ran the CIA because he supposedly denied Allen Dulles information from the committee reviewing the attempted assassination of Mr En-Lai.

    As we shall see Hankey is distorting this scenario; hence, exaggerating once again. He is also exposing the shallowness of his reasoning and research for the umpteenth time.

    Hankey Pankey at Murder Solved

    After my Hankey piece, I ended my stint at the Murder Solved Forum. I still hold the vast majority of the people there in high regard, and they were great fun. Indeed, while I do not share Wim Dankbaar’s take on several things (PB in particular) their tolerance of my positions was humbling. Indeed, Murder Solved stands as the only current staging point for any moderated debate between a CTKA representative, (Jim, who stepped in after I left) and John Hankey.

    What piqued my interest at the time was a comment made by Hankey below.

    “Prescott Bush was sent to investigate. And, says Trento, Dulles asked for an update, and was told that he didn’t have sufficient clearance. My points are two-fold: 1) the fact that Dulles was director, and therefore in the public spotlight, suggests that he would have been a figurehead so that things could go on behind the scenes, directed by truly powerful parties unknown, and 2) this story of Trento’s suggest that Prescott was the power behind the scenes.”

    This is a gross misappropriation of the author (Trento) and his comments by Hankey. It also opened up a can of worms that Hankey, in his desperation to distort for his own purposes, missed.

    Trento and Corson Translated for Mr Hankey

    Let us now re-examine Hankey’s rather game changing sentence…

    “And, says Trento, Dulles asked for an update, and was told that he didn’t have sufficient clearance.”

    Trento actually wrote the following, and the parallels with Hankey’s absurd fantasies with the Bush/CIA document are all too obvious.

    “Bush pressed Corson about whether there had been any out of the ordinary communications preceding the ill-fated assignment. Corson told Bush that Allen Dulles had made attempts to find out what Truscott’s operatives were doing. I explained to him that I thought Dulles was unhappy because he was not told operational details when his agency had to provide logistical support. That seemed to satisfy Bush.”

    If PB really did fly to Hong Kong and discuss the operation with Corson, then he made it very clear he wanted to find out about Dulles. Dulles, for his part, purportedly wants to know about what Colonel Lucian Truscott’s operatives were doing. The last part is so straightforward it is mind –boggling that Hankey could have distorted it as he did. Dulles only wants to know what was happening so he could supply the expertise and equipment. There is no indication of Dulles being cut out of the loop, and there is no indication of Bush being in on it. Nor is there any evidence of some banal committee meeting. In fact, it is just the opposite, the “that seemed to satisfy Bush” line indicates Corson had brushed him off. No matter what Hankey has said, he clearly is wrong about this. Just as he distorted the McBride/Hoover/Bush memo. However, as we will see, Trento was conned, as well.

    Bill Corson: Angleton’s Rebellious Limited Hangout Truth Teller William Corson is an intriguing figure. While he posed as something of a rebel, I liken him to James Bamford. He is essentially a guy cut loose to be a limited hangout exponent. Corson worked for Dulles, and while maintaining his stance as a CIA outsider, he introduced Trento to James Angleton.

    How many CIA rebellious “outsiders” recommend authors to people like Jim Angleton? Corson also cooked up the story to Trento that Dulles petitioned LBJ to be on the Warren Commission (Trento “Secret History of the CIA” pages, 268-269). Although, as Donald Gibson brilliantly surmised in “The Assassinations”, the data indicates there would not have been a Warren Commission without a guarantee of Dulles on it. Dulles clearly wasn’t begging anyone.

    Corson, for all of his CIA critiques, was a dyed in the wool Angleton supporter. In the 80’s, he co-wrote a book with Robert Crowley, Angleton’s friend at the CIA. This book was called “The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power”. It argued that, contrary to what many thought was going on in the Soviet Union at the time—the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev—nothing had changed at all, and the KGB was actually running the country. Which, as we know today, is so wrong as to be ludicrous and dangerous. Corson was putting out a propaganda line, with some help from Crowley and Angleton. Still, Hankey somehow cannot see how this throws backward light on the Hong Kong story.

    Really, Corson like any limited hangout specialist, was more than prepared to distribute BS and spread a little bit of truth when he could. His angle concerning GHWB being moulded by Dulles, is one of his more credible claims. Although, I have to be careful of cherry picking here. Corson spoke a lot of BS. There is nothing outside of him to indicate any special status bestowed upon GHWB by Dulles. Allen already had his own beautiful children: Dick Helms and Jim Angleton. As for PB, as one will see throughout this article there is little verification, even anecdotal, for the role Corson puts him in. Indeed, the roots of the bogus all-powerful PB angle today seem to stem solely from his direction.

    The Dubious Meeting with Prescott in Hong Kong

    John Hankey, who never figured this out on his own, is likely to try and say we are defending the Bush family (again). This is stupid. PB was a blue blood of his age. He had no problems with Nazi money, was an ardent supporter of the CIA, and he was a Bonesman, which gave him some useful contacts. He only was never as high up the chain of command as John Hankey fantasizes, not even close. The comment below from Corson is more important and more dubious than anything JH has said about PB and EnLai.

    “I was unaware that the senator was at that altitude. I didn’t know anyone outside the White House who knew about these operations. That’s how I learned that he (Prescott) was Ike’s adviser on the most secret covert operations.” (Page 11)

    Corson is referring to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Prescott Bush allegedly sat on. Yet, this committee is not White House brass; it is made up entirely of bipartisan groups of politicians of which even a cursory glance on Google will tell you Bush was not even a chair. If perchance Bush were involved, this hodgepodge group would have been out of their league in dealing with the CIA. Their monitoring of the agency was not even in their mandate for starters.

    Thus, I find it hard to believe Corson, a veritable alley cat, would not have known about the NSC (National Security Council) NSC 5412/1 and 2 committees set up in 1955 not to mention the rather more secretive “President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities.” Nevertheless, this kicked off in early January of 1956 . (John Ranelagh, “The Agency”, page 279).

    The reprinted version of “The Secret History of the CIA” which came out in 2005 does not mention PB, while GHWB barely gets any coverage. When Trento discusses En-Lai in the former, he uses an interview with Donald Denesyla, “Corsons Armies of Ignorance”, and Miles Copeland’s “Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics”. Corson’s account is the only one that mentions PB. Hence, what I find interesting in Trento’s “Prelude to Terror”, which was also released that year, is Trento, who was obviously coy on Corson’s PB story, in “The Secret History of the CIA”. He seems to have noted “evil and discredited Bush family” books sold like hot cakes. He simply added the PB story he initially ignored due to its implausibility to make a buck in “Prelude to Terror”.

    Therefore, I must give credit to Russ Baker here. He too dealt with the Zhou En-Lai angle and got sucked into Corson’s PB line. However, he never really tried definitively pushing the PB insider angle as much as Trento had. Besides, he was nowhere near as off the wall as Hankey was.

    A Suspicious Mind is Never Satisfied

    Here are just a few things that bug me about Corson’s account.

    • Regardless of their being no evidence anywhere in any Eisenhower biography, or in the Eisenhower Library concerning PB being intelligence adviser to Eisenhower, why not just send Corson home or get someone else to debrief him in Washington?
    • Why didn’t PB simply call up Truscott?
    • Why didn’t he take a stroll and have a cup of tea with Allen?
    • While it is feasible, PB may have snuck into Hong Kong, the idea of a well-known and highly visible 6 foot 4, U.S. Politician, playing a game of golf on a popular course after a very important clandestine event with a known covert operator 6km across from Red China is simply stupid.
    • Bush taking a journey of some 7,892 miles (11,265,408 km) for a ridiculously short chat and a round of golf is worse than anything Hankey could dream up.

    These queries further detract from Corson’s dubious tale. Furthermore, if Dulles were not waiting on Truscott for anything. If there were not some mythical committee that somehow held Dulles accountable. If PB were never in this mystical group or partook, in the,NSC1-2 meetings, it stands to reason the people chasing the evidence were not getting anything substantial. Why, because Corson is having a yarn.

    Sympathy for the Hankey

    I can understand Hankey’s confusion here, Trento, and Baker, the two blokes who have made the most of the tale in recent years, for whatever reason, ignored the bigger picture. Hence, Hankey can legitimately blame people for leading him astray (to a small degree) for once. This is a small consolation for gross ineptitude, and incompetence.

    The aforementioned General Lucian Truscott was not part of some Eisenhower group watching over Dulles. Nor was he the loyal General fearing for Eisenhower being embarrassed by a Dulles operation as Corson and Trento claim (Trento, “Secret History of the CIA”, page 494). What no one will tell you is Truscott was CIA all the way, and a close associate of Dulles. He was a no bullshit guy, and he wouldn’t have taken any crap from a minor league politician like PB. In his biography, “Dog Face Soldier”, the Zhou operation is discussed (Page 281), but there is no mention of Corson’s stroll on the green with Bush. Which Truscott would certainly have heard about; indeed, there is no mention of PB anywhere in the book.

    As said, there are no credible sources anywhere for PB’s ascension to Eisenhower’s inner intelligence sanctum. Corson is the alpha and omega on the issue, and as we have seen the man is someone to be extremely cautious of. None of the (or for that matter the worst) studies of the CIA mention PB, nor do any of the intelligence investigations of the 70’s. Moreover, the “worst” point really says something about Trento, and Hankey on this PB angle. How bad does one have to be to get smashed by Phil Nelson? I’ll say something for his horrific “LBJ did it” book (which I have the equally horrific job of reviewing). That fool never went down this road either.

    Prouty, another of Hankey’s misquoted and abused heroes, appeared to be interested in, but generally paid PB little notice. This is significant since his insights into Dulles and the CIA, and the Cold War is extensive. Moreover, Prouty’s work on Dulles is amongst his most verifiable, valuable, and accurate work. I’d trust him way before Corson, yet oddly Hankey does not. Yet, if we take Hankey to his most pathetic extreme. Is he now saying people like Prouty are wrong for not buying into the PB kingpin angle?

    Don’t worry, he will make up some absurd and lame excuse. Please read on as I have a lovely little angle – ton (pardon the pun) he can use for free.

    Forget Hankey, Remember Angleton

    Everyone is overlooking the fact that Corson’s book came out in 1977 at the time when the HSCA was convening. It was also some months after Bush retired from as DCI of the CIA. So let us look at what Angleton was doing.

    • Corson hooked Trento up with Angleton. Via this relationship, the story of Hunt in Dealey Plaza trying to prevent a Russian hit was let slip.
    • During the HSCA, Angleton was also fooling around with Epstein pressuring George DeMohrenschildt to go with an oil men plot.
    • Trento, unwittingly or not, created another layer to the Prescott Bush intelligence guru angle by quoting a dubious story by an old mate.

    Ironically, while GHWB was CIA, DeM was contacting him to call off Angleton’s harassment campaign. GHWB effectively gave him his burn notice. Yet, being a master plotter and shooter GHWB decided to keep his contact with DeM in the records. Clever guy that Bush isn’t he? Hankey drops the GHWB dart gun in Hoover’s office angle to make him an arrested shooter in the depository (amongst other hilarity discussed in Parts 1-3). The aforementioned lack of documentation for Bush being in Eisenhower’s intelligence apparatus will lead some excitable folk like John to say documents have been destroyed. The reality is if an acolyte of Angleton like Corson is pimping Bush with next to no evidence, he is clearly not doing it for the cause of truth.

    However, JH will likely now seize the opportunity to leap in, as there is an angle here. Furthermore, seeing as JH likes debating inanimate recordings and putting words in people’s mouths they never said, I have taken it upon myself to have this little debate. Unlike JH, I have even given him the last word.

    Seamus Coogan’s point of view concerning Angleton, Corson and PB.

    “Angleton was probably making a veiled threat to Bush, via this phoney story to enforce on GHWB how far back his ties to the agency really went. Bush was moving into the political sphere and in years would be the vice President. His CIA role would always bug him. Angelton knew all the scabs to pick. Yet, it was not just GHWB (who obviously feared Angleton immensely, by the way) Angleton targeted. His limited hangout stooges took punts right across the bow of U.S politics and intelligence. Not all of his targets necessarily had anything to do with JFK. Angleton, was involved in and knew of numerous criminal activities across the gamut of Washington and beyond.”

    John Hankey’s take on Angleton, Corson and PB

    “Angleton, like Hoover, also knew those Bush scumbags killed Kennedy. So what does he do? He tells Corson; that’s he does. And by doing that he’s saying to Bush “I know you killed JFK you little bastard. And I know your Nazi Dad was really running the CIA. Why? Because I was working for Dulles, and we all knew about PB’s secret security group he ran for Eisenhower.”

    Were this one of his God-awful videos, one can imagine the shooting script. Cue: Cheap, shitty, Flash animations of Angleton with a pythonesque mouth jabbering away. Fade in picture of Bush family with Hitler moustaches, swastika,’s holding poorly photo shopped dildo’s in their hands. I shall leave it up to you the reader to decide who is in charge of the facts.

    A Little Something Extra

    Here is part of Jim’s reply to JH, which also adds another nail in his arguments’ coffin. Whichever shape it may be. It is from their exchange at Murder Solved Forum:

    “As Seamus showed in his essay, there is no mention of this Bush for Dulles substitution in either of the two standard reference books on the CIA. So what does Hankey now do? He says that Prescott Bush was on a committee of inquiry in the Chou En Lai assassination affair. Dulles asked him for the status of the inquiry and Prescott declined to tell him. Therefore, Prescott was really the power behind Dulles at CIA. This is a totally illogical deduction. Every so often, there is an internal inquiry at CIA. During the Dulles years, there were, for example, the Bruce-Lovett report and the Lyman Kirkpatrick report on the Bay of Pigs. If Dulles has asked David Bruce, Robert Lovett or Kirkpatrick to divulge anything from their reports before it was done, and they had refused, would that mean that these three men were really in charge at CIA and not Allen Dulles? Of course not. The very question seems ridiculous. But these are the illogical lengths that Hankey will go to in twisting evidence to buttress his baseless theory.”


    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 3


    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    “Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

  • Master Class with John Hankey, III:  The Podcast

    Master Class with John Hankey, III: The Podcast


    This session of Fetzer’s podcast begins with Fetzer and King discussing how CTKA didn’t show up for the debate. They have their reality we have our own. Regardless of their claims that we backed off, one can see here in Part II I would be more than happy to oblige them should JH be willing to participate with the aforementioned questions.

    11 Min: Outtake of “The Jim Garrison Tapes”

    Gary King adds a segment from John Barbour’s “The Garrison Tapes” production. It discusses the Bay of Pigs invasion and uses Garrison, Prouty, and David Phillips. The segment has nothing whatsoever to do with GHWB but it serves to make out as if Hankey will somehow defend and champion Garrison and Fletcher Prouty’s cause. The problem is we do not have any real problems with either. Once again, people familiar with CTKA and our material will see through this diversion.

    14 Min: “And he’s Away.”

    Important Note: Hankey says he will go through the evidence point by point. Yet he does not run through a list of the topics discussed or give the reader a general time – frame. This is standard for a presentation because that is what Hankey’s rambling approach is. To call this farcical approach a debate of any weight is a grievance against standard debate procedure.

    Straight out of the blocks Hankey begins discussing the trials and tribulations Gary had getting us on. Without including the CIA agent baiting mentioned before. Wow, I thought this was about GHWB? Anyhow, salivating with sarcasm he thanks Jim Di and his friends (namely Frank Cassano and I) for attacking him, because, we have forced him to look at his positions. Cassano is involved because Hankey accused Jim of being a CIA agent on the aforementioned James Corbett show. Cassano and I called in to complain. But Hankey now says that after his re-evaluation, he now realizes his position was actually much stronger than he realized. (Yes, and I am the reincarnation of Mao Zedong).

    He now uses his old “Jim amasses a ton of irrelevant information to discredit me and never confronts the main stuff” routine. Which is a new take on his “my evidence was incorrect but my conclusions were correct” bull. This is interesting on two counts. First, Jim did not write the article he is contesting. I did. Jim only edited that article and most of what he did was edit for length. The actual substance is about 90% my own. Second, as noted, he has now changed his defense. On the “Murder Solved Forum”, he admitted to almost all of the mistakes I pointed out in my piece. And he was even repetant about most of them. But his defense there was he was still correct on his main thesis about Bush. Which obviously sidesteps the issue of: how can a guy who makes so many errors about so many topics be correct about a major thesis? When in fact, the standard of this kind of thesis is: Extraordinary claims demand extraordianry evidence.

    15 Min: How Many Years have you Been Researching John?

    “I’ve been researching the assassination in a pretty serious fashion for about forty years.”

    This is a vast improvement from JH claiming he had been a researcher for 50 years four years before the 50th anniversary.

    “It took me nearly 40 years to find these memos; and nearly another ten to figure out what they mean. Believe me, I’m not bragging. But I am advocating patience”

    JH will try denying this by saying we made it up (have a look at the 56:57 passage for a stellar example). Sadly for JH its right here 40 + 10 = 50. (http://911blogger.com/node/19864)

    As I explained in my first essay, Hankey says he got involved in about 1999 after JFK Jr’s plane crash. IMDB say JFK II came out in 2003 (I said 2004 originally). Hankey’s movie is officially 12 years old and John has been perfecting his stand-up routine for 15. He had only spent some 2-3 years looking at the case before he decided come through the curtain and be a big star. That is a rather substantial difference of 25 years in terms of his 40 years of research.

    Hell, at least he has dropped his banal story about holding talks at different campuses concerning the JFK case. Judging by what he is spouting now, those discussions would have been awful (if they ever happened).

    15 – 16 Min: Memo Madness

    On top of all we have written about his insane memo fetish and the denouncement of JH’s interpretation by Joseph McBride the man who found the documents. I really do not need to go on. Except to say Bush was not the head of the CIA in 1972. His tenure was from January 1976 to 1977.

    Wait… did he just say the memo states that George Bush is the supervisor of the killers again? Damn, I was hoping he would announce that he was bullied and had an unhappy childhood. That might explain his over engaged fantasy world and his distortion of the JFK case.

    18 Min: No Thanks to CTKA

    Hankey mentions the famous memo Angleton let Trento have a peak at which placed Hunt in Dealey Plaza that day. However, he won’t say anything about us correcting him on the issue. He originally said Helms wrote the memo, not Angleton. Remember, this is from “Plausible Denial”, a book he supposedly pores over, and then recently called “Rush to Judgement”. Indeed, JH as one will see, has apparently co-opted a lot of CTKA material with which he used to lecture us about.

    19 Min: The Bush Dulles Meeting

    Hankey has a particular obsession for a dinner Prescott Bush had with Allen Dulles. I discussed this meeting in my last Hankey article. JH had told radio host James Corbett that the “Pilot Project” was about “George Bush and the Bay of Pigs.” However, he is now saying the project refers to George Bush setting up his oil company. Both are hilariously off the ball. The document is dated April 1963. That’s two years after the Bay of Pigs, and to cap it off Bush Jr had set up his oil business in 1953-54.

    It is no big deal Prescott Bush was friendly with Dulles. A whole heap of wealthy elitiest were friends with Allen. For he was one of the them; hence, why be does JH get so excited over the association with Prescott? Was Prescott as close to Dulles as Helms, Phillips, Hunt, Edwards, Truscott, Bissell, Cabell, Angleton or CD Jackson. That is an extremely closed group of pals. I would like to know how Bush interacted with this group?

    As I said, if Hankey is going to try and use bluestering langauge he can at least get his facts right and keep his story straight. He can also get real about the relationships Dulles had with his intelligence cronies. As one will note throughout the guy can do none of this.

    20 Min: Hunt and Bush

    JH says the Bay of Pigs was where Bush met E Howard Hunt. He has said this for a long time. If perchance, Bush was involved in some of the smaller aspects of anti-Castro operations the two could have met. We have never said it was impossible; nevertheless, when one has an editor (which Hankey does not) we cut little pieces that didn’t ram home the point in “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey.” I wrote…

    “The viewer may have noted that in skipping over the nefarious American activities in Latin America at the time. Hankey has presented absolutely no evidence of Hunt and Bush working together on anything other than the Bay of Pigs, and even that is an unproven and indirect relationship.”

    I should have kept the line “the two could have met” and then added “but even that is an unproven and indirect relationship” in my first Hankey piece. It is hardly an admission and it changes nothing. The problem we have is that Hunt was a big player, an out and out intelligence hard core operative. Bush maybe was essentially a CIA business liaison with political ambitions. The CIA, like any intel agency, uses compatmentalization and delegates agents and contractors based on their abilities. You don’t just become a covert operator, you get chosen.

    In the past Hankey has tried to intimate Bush would have been higher up the chain for the Bay of Pigs than Hunt. He seems to have dropped this angle (for the time being at least) preferring to now say Bush was in charge of Dallas (check out the inanity some 24:00 minutes in). He has even gone so far to say Bush was a shooter!

    Of course, listening to JH we had nothing to do with his modifying this aspect of the story. Nor did my first article have anything to do with his abandoning the notion Bush and Hunt used Hunt’s oil platform at Cal Say as the staging point for the Bay of Pigs. Now he has something else to learn from us. JH ludicrously believes the CIA launched the Bay of Pigs with only two boats “Houston” and “Barbara.” In fact, there were four others.

    Atlántico, Rio Escondido, Caribe, and Braggart.

    Furthermore, one does not need to misquote Mark Lane concerning what Fletcher Prouty said about the Bush/BOP connection to prove Hunt and Bush could have known each other.

    Hunt potentially bumping into Bush is no big deal.

    21 Min: The old “Why aren’t you Attacking Lane/Prouty it’s his/their fault” Line

    Hankey pulls this old chestnut out again. Our reasoning, as I have said before, is very simple. I ask the reader to look at Mark Lane’s history and record compared to JH’s. Lane has bought some good work to the table, as has Fletcher Prouty. Hankey on the other hand provides accidental comedy. We have criticized Lane before. Indeed, we did in the very first Hankey review and we were slightly disappointed with his last book. But further, neither Lane nor Poruty have ever taken the Bush/Hoover memo nearly as far as Hankey has. That is, to have made a whole film about it. If they would have, and it was anything like Hankey’s, we would have criticized them also.

    What is hilarious is not once has he turned on Jim and I saying “Why don’t you attack Paul Kangas, Jim Fetzer, Russ Baker, or Murder Solved. I got my stuff from those sources.”

    Thus, if Hankey were ever to debate (and trust me I am very game). We want his beloved fall back line “Why don’t CTKA attack blah, blah” to be one of the questions.

    24 Min: Bush out of the BOP in Charge of Dallas

    We know there is a decent chance Howard Hunt, and David Phillips were in or near Dealey Plaza that day. Hunt’s appearance came via the Angleton memo, and his ninety percent dubious testimonies in his book and to his son. David Phillips came thanks to his brother. One has to ask why this bunch of pipe swinging intelligence professionals would hand the Dallas project over to an office junior like George. Because that’s what JH is saying around about now.

    The Parrot Memo (http://jfkmurdersolved.com/images/bushwarning.jpg) becomes a particular sticking point for JH here. Why isn’t there any FBI documentation of Hunt, and Phillips calling in for their alibis or calling up people to name as false suspects? Indeed, why didn’t they run advertisements they were in town giving speeches against fighting Communism? The whole scenario is juvenile and schoolyard. Bush, the supposed team leader in Dallas, has to call in with a fake report to create an alibi for killing the headmaster to his mother. That is what the whole thing plays out like.

    I would imagine the assassins of Kennedy being somewhat less accountable to the FBI than dear George appears to be. Hankey’s angle that Jim DiEugenio has kept quiet on Bush’s phone call is a boldfaced lie. Jim discussed and destroyed the Parrot Memo silliness and the idea of Bush leading a squad in his review of Russ Baker’s book.

    25 Min: Hankey’s Ever Changing Landscape and Bush a Shooter

    JH now discusses the Craig/Vaughn account he gave in his VT article concerning Bogus George arrest outside the Dal Tex building. He says he has known about the account for a long, long time. If so, he never used it until he got desperate for options. Adding new information is perfectly okay in a presentation like this but there are parameters. If JH had a shred of honesty, he would say to his listeners…

    “Jim and Seamus did not raise these points in their articles and interviews at the time but I would like to add…”

    He never does this and he brings up the Parrot memo. I never discussed the above Parrot phone call in my review because Hankey did not bring it up in the version of his documentary I watched.

    Anyhow, JH has added the Bush TSBD angle to his repertoire. Again, this was not in his catalogue of marital aids at the time I was first encountering him. CTKA reacted to JH, as we would to any bad JFK product. He got a bad review befitting the horror he created. He then got snarky (ridiculously so as you can see). Had he bought this dubious material up back then he would have received the same treatment he is getting now. So his attempts at intimating that somehow we missed something, for reasons stated above, fall flat.

    Anyhow, let us cap off a stunning barrage of fibs concerning CTKA, Bush’s arrest and his Parrott phone call. Hankey, almost beside himself with self-righteousness, now announces something absolutely shocking in its arrogance:

    “Bush was caught with a frigging gun in his hand.”

    Maybe this is just a figure of speech. I hope it is. For the man cannot be serious. Vaughn never said that to Craig. Indeed, we need a brief summary of Hankeyian events from 24-25 minutes to refocus, as there is so much wonderful, factual, and logical information to absorb.

    • Bush the leader of the hit squad is arrested with a gun outside the Dal Tex building. So was he shooting at JFK with a pistol?
    • Obtaining a quick release from the police GHWB then poses in a suit and tie outside the TSBD for a picture.
    • Then he leaps in a car and goes to the Blackstone Hotel in Tyler Texas where places a telephone call to the FBI concerning dissident James Parrott precisely ten minutes later.

    I am not saying all of this is impossible, noooo I would never say that. It is just incredibly improbable. I mean, take the third point. Tyler, Texas is something like 97 miles from Dallas. The driving time is about 90 minutes. Yet, this is John Hankey and therefore in his alternative universe, anything really is possible. As long as it makes George Bush a part of the JFK assassination.

    29 Min: Hunt a Sniper in China and Morales ran JM WAVE

    As one can see from the above rubric, this is turning into a vintage performance from the old master. Not even Saint John Hunt (his son) mentioned E. Howard training as a sniper in China and that guy can talk a lot of gunk. Sure Hunt was a killer, all active CIA black op types are. Nevertheless, if Hankey understood operations, he would know that to be a presidential level sniper Hunt would have had to be training every day for hours on end. Nothing in Hunt’s life and his activities in covert planning indicate the required marksmanship dedication.

    It appears judging by some of Hankey’s later comments concerning Bush being a , well any idiot can become an assassin. As for the ludicrous idea of Morales running JM WAVE, well that is to be expected of JH’s quest for accuracy and evidence. Unbeleivable carelessness. Ted Shackley ran JM WAVE.

    30 Min: Beatles Songs – Interval

    Thank you Jim Fetzer, your research is appalling but I have never appreciated the Beatles more.

    The first quarter is over, and it has been a torrid battle. Not between Jim and John. Hell, the chief hasn’t even made his appearance. It seems that Hankey has done a stellar job of beating himself up. If this train wreck does this to himself, one has to wonder what on Earth will happen when he battles samples of Jim?

    36 Min: Jim Finally Gets a Bite

    Prior to Jim’s debut JH insinuated that Jim is hard to follow because he goes off on tangents and jumps around topics. Hankey really needs to make like Michael Jackson and talk to the “Man in the mirror.” He also needs to “Beat it” because a number of the samples he has chosen are deliberately cut to make Jim come across as a blithering madman. Sadly, for JH there is only one blithering idiot and he is not moon walking out of this one.

    Anyhow, Jim discusses the problem of people over identifying suspects in the pictures and films of Dealey that day. When he mentions names, he is paying no particular attention to any one suspect. Nor is he actually saying none of them are there. It is a position bar one or two slight differences I share with Jim. Namely if we put everybody’s suspects into the mix, we have a grossly inefficient and rather silly conspiracy. Incidentally, the kind JH’s Godfather, JIm Fetzer, adores.

    37 Min: Hankey, Fletcher Prouty’s Brave Champion

    Hankey replies and states categorically that all the subjects Jim names are in there. However, it soon gets crazier. He discusses Ed Lansdale’s possible sighting as if he has been a long-time advocate. However, as with the Bush outside the TSBD his new Lansdale angle occurred well after my first and second articles, not to mention Jim’s BOR interview.

    As said in Part I, I am open to the Lansdale picture but I refuse go to the bank on any photo ID. JH now launches a grossly hypocritical diatribe about CTKA’s insensitivity towards all things Prouty. If CTKA is so insulting to the Colonel, I have to ask why Len has Jim on Black Ops Radio every other week. Surely Hankey knows Len’s background with Prouty? I mean Len had the charity to have Hankey on his show once. An interesting aside is a claim by Fetzer that Jim is running BOR. The result being Hankey and himself have been turfed. If Jim ran BOR, he certainly would not have Fetzer’s pal Mark DeValk on. Plain and simple, Len also got a lot of complaints about JH and Fetzer. Hence, it was a no brainer not to have them back. Further, Fetzer has begun to attack len in print. Why should Len genuflect to someone who is trashing him? Finally, Fetzer, with his participation in the zany OIP, his obsession with Zapruder film alteration, and his attacks on Tink Thompson, and his belief in the likes of Judith Baker and now Hankey and also Peter Janney, with all this, Fetzer has now occupied the very far out reaches of the JFK community. Black Op Radio is not about those Outer Limits. Its about what is provable in this case by the standard of civil law. That is, would a jury vote 9-3 in favor of the critical case in front of them. That later work of Fetzer, and now that of Hankey, does not qualify as such.

    40 Min: Sanctimonious + Insanity = Hypocrisy

    Hold the phone Martha! JH’s let loose another ripper. He’s scolding Jim for dismissing people without looking at the evidence adding, “Jim never does that.” My God, JH is pulling out all the hypocritical stops he can. The sound bites he has selected of course do not let Jim build any argument or evidence. JH also all forgets about the screeds of writing we have at CTKA dissecting his stuff, and on top of that, Jims Black Op Radio interview, and our stint on the Corbett Report. Jim by the way has written and edited four books. He has also written and edited hundreds of articles. If JH really wants proof there is a website called CTKA, the one you the reader are visiting right now, then he also needs to read this article an dmaybe, just maybe, learn something about journalistic standeards and th rules of logic and evidence.

    42-43 Min: Nixon Hired Hunt and other Fantasies

    What is interesting is that JH has dropped his inane Connally – Nixon angle. The one he assiduously pushed in his first documentary. Indeed, he was still pushing the Connally angle when Jim encountered Hankey over at Murder Solved.

    The Nixon angle is in my first article on JH. He completely ignores the points and evidence in that section, or does he? Hankey now says he agrees that Hunt set up Nixon, as if he has known that all along. If he did, surely a man of his integrity would have included this point in his documentaries. However, Hankey is not knowledgeable or honest. He only learned this from the original CTKA article I wrote and Jim’s interview. Hence, all JH can do now is scream something along the lines that “Nixon knew he was employing Hunt, because he hired him” Which is an illogical sentence to begin with.

    I wrote,

    For instance, Hankey states that Nixon brought Howard Hunt into the White House. Not accurate. As Jim Hougan points out in his brilliant and revolutionary Secret Agenda, prior to being hired by Charles Colson – not Nixon – Hunt worked at a CIA front called the Mullen Company. This was ostensibly an advertising and public relations firm. It was closely aligned with Howard Hughes. It was presided over at the time by CIA asset Robert Bennett. It was Bennett who mentioned Hunt’s name to Colson; Hunt then offered his services to him; and then Colson hired Hunt. (Hougan p. 33) It was an act that Colson came to regret. Why? Because Hunt appears to have been a CIA infiltrator in the White House who, along with James McCord, deliberately sabotaged the Plumbers at Watergate and helped collapse Nixon’s presidency. (ibid, pgs. 270-75)”

    It is clear Nixon learned of Hunt while he was at the Mullen Company, and then in the White House. And it is clear he did use him from time to time. And Nixon did mention Hunt on the White House tapes before the was hired. But there is still no proof or real evidence that Nixon hired Hunt. If I was Nixon and I was unsuspecting of his true motives too ultimately screw me I would have not done so as well. Hunt was a pro. Nevertheless, if Hankey was not such a knee jerk reactionary his comment concerning why Nixon would have a suspect in the Kennedy assassination hanging around the White House would actually merit discussion. Because it seems clear to some, like Hougan, that the CIA was infiltrating Nixon’s White House, the Plumbers, and CREEP. And as Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease have argued, one can make a credible thesis that many of the players invovled in murdering Kennedy, were also involved with removing Nixon.

    Indeed, Jim Hougan and Jim DiEugenio have discussed Watergate on Black Ops Radio. So too has Hankey’s new archenemy in his pantheon of victimisation Lisa Pease (check out Hankeys grand finale at 1H: 52).

    During JH sermon, about Nixon it is obvious he is once again trying to position CTKA to points of view we have either never held or have actually discussed before. Hence, we have another thing JH can add to his future arguments. Nixon apparently met Hunt during his trip to Latin America in 1958.

    44-45 Min: I Only Made Two Mistakes and CTKA Endorses Barr McClellan!

    JH is angry because Jim and I took the mickey out of him for his unfunny picture of Nixon holding a gun in Dealey Plaza. He begrudgingly admits this was a mistake and he should not have done it. Later he admits he made a mistake with the Nixon – Ruby memo (see below at 51-52 minutes). Declaring he only made these two mistakes. However, he will not tell you he has dropped his classic Prescott Bush funded Nixon into the White House gag. Not to mention a misdated photo he has of them shaking hands with Nazi armbands. Indeed, I spent over some 1000+ words explaining JH’s Nixon follies. He also won’t tell the reader that on his website he has a version of his debate with Jim in which he omits Jim’s post outlining some 20 errors he noted in the first half of JH’s JFK II. I mentioned this in my follow up article some years ago.

    He then asks what Nixon was doing in Dallas if not to kill JFK. Well Johnny Boy, Nixon was in Dallas for a Pepsi Cola Bottlers Convention. There was very little hoopla at all. He was not there merely to give speeches and bump Kennedy off as Hankey implied. Nixon’s comment about Johnson and his removal off the JFK ticket was essentially in passing to the press. Nixon could have made his statements anywhere; nevertheless, I personally think Nixon was not there by accident or by his design either. Hence, his presence that day provided another additional layer of mystery. Essentially, he was a red herring.

    CTKA Endorses the Johnson Hypothesis

    I thought this deserved a title. Simply because it is so ludicrous one must take note. Neither Jim nor I have ever fully advocated for the Kennedy ticket dumping Johnson in 1964. That is really up in the air as the sources for his scandals at the time have been poor and compromised. We have no doubt Johnson was dodgy to a degree. However, what Texas politician of the era, bar the odd Ralph Yarbrough, was not? As much of a liability as he was, LBJ was essential for Kennedy’s success in the South. Jim and I have written about this ad nauseam. Hankey, for the umpteenth time, appears to be lifting information off us and trying to lecture Jim about issues long known to CTKA.

    It is a shame he is so dodgy because he makes the point about Barr McClellan’s ties to GWB, a point of view people have. This is actually a clever use of the information I got from Alex Constantine’s site. I mentioned it in my article on Alex Jones. However, this was after apparently reading my article on Alex Jones (Hankey is not a good enough researcher to find this sort of good information himself). He then seemingly babbles on about Jim and I endorsing Barr McClellan. We have never endorsed McClellan. Nor any of the recent LBJ did it cul de sacs. Indeed, we have numerous articles discussing why we do not.

    Therefore, why is Jim Fetzer the kingpin of all the worst LBJ did it dross, endorsing Hankeys stance? He clearly hates us enough to have Hankey dump on his argument. Clever guy that Jim Fetzer. A man who has clearly lost his was from his former academic standards. Now, apparently, the end justifies the means.

    51-52 Min: Why Doesn’t Jim Attack Prouty

    It’s time for the old “Why do they always pick on me” routine. Hankey says he got the bogus Nixon – Ruby memo from Prouty. So why aren’t we attacking Prouty? Well, it is for the same reason we don’t go for Lane. Prouty has enriched the case, not detracted from it. The man could make one or two mistakes; he earned that right. Hankey has not earned that privilege and he likely never will. Furthermore, JH is responsible for the information he chooses to use. His deferment of responsibility is very immature and unprecedented in the field. One is not supposed to pass on questionable material, no matter who the source is. A true critical thinker cross checks materials that seem to good to be true.

    56:57 Min: Hankey’s Implausible Denial (You Have to Read This Folks)

    Now, until here, there have been some jaw dropping and hilarious moments. Nevertheless, this is the highlight of the entire charade. Hankey now plays an important segment of Jim’s BOR interview. This discusses Hankey’s ineptitude concerning Allen Dulles and his deep background in the spy trade.

    “I am not sure what it is that he’s (Jim) trying to say here, I mean besides that I’m incredibly ignorant, and that is his main point which is always his main point, always.”

    JH is correct about something: he is “incredibly ignorant.” He then rambles on about Dulles getting the CIA job, only because of his Nazi ties. This belittles the sound research many others have done concerning Dulles’ post WWII background. JH says these facts are niggling little annoyances that do not apparently amount to much. Nevertheless, JH’s actions at the 57 minute, mark indicate he took these niggling facts rather seriously.

    Hankey plays an excerpt from Jim’s interview in which Jim quotes Hankey from my piece.

    “Prescott Bush is the guy who during WWI was with Army Intelligence. Dulles was not with army intelligence during WWI and it’s a little bit surprising that he would be put in charge of the CIA instead of Prescott, given that they are more or less parallel in their power up until that time.”

    Hankey abruptly states …

    “He’s making that quote up! But never mind let’s move on.”

    I quoted Hankey directly from Black Op Radio on show 424, May 2009. The show is in Len’s archives. Why on Earth did he choose that particular statement and then act as he did? Was it to try to wound Jim’s credibility, or to save his own? Either way, he not only shoved a foot in his mouth, but he shoved the other in there also. And why did Fetzer accept this at face value?

    58:30 Min: If the Head of the CIA is a Front why the Boner about GHWB

    JH is angling for his old Prescott Bush was the power behind the throne line. To be honest he has not bought PB up yet; however, he starts pondering aloud inane stuff like “The head of the CIA is a front”, he is not naming names but he is clearly saying this about Dulles as he has used this line many times before in relation to Prescott, and he discusses him at 1H:02.

    If the head of the CIA is a puppet then why does he make such a huge deal about GHWB and his one-year gig as DCI? Furthermore, Prescott Bush must have been tripping on acid to let his son, whom never trained as a sniper take a shot at President Kennedy, as Hankey now insinuates. Indeed, if you hark back to 24-45, minute mark GHWB’s shooting at Kennedy was not the only dumb thing George did that day. He says his hypothesis “is a can of worms.” I can think of a few things to call it and it is not worms; thus, I can only wonder what Russ Baker is thinking. Baker tried vainly to bring credibility to the Bush did it hypothesis. I wonder how he feels to have his efforts smeared by JH.

    1H: 02 Min: Hankey and Zhou En-Lai

    This is very long so I have made it into a separate article, which can be found here [need link here]. Thank the lord for the Beatle interlude once again.

    1H: 30 Min: Hoover Beatles.

    The next 12 minutes or so is a bizarre ode to J Edgar Hoover. Hankey has long believed the CIA pressured Hoover concerning the Kennedy assassination. CTKA has known and understood all of the angles JH discusses, but more besides. JH has never read Anthony Summers work (and that’s just an entree). Thus, he fails to understand what 99 percent of researchers believe that Hoover did not need much cajoling to participate in the cover up. He also tries to swing it that CTKA endorsed the idea of Hoover as a main plotter. That might be good enough for Peter Dale Scott, Phil Nelson, or Jim Fetzer; but that type of analysis is not good enough for CTKA.

    1H:42 Min: “This Guy is so Full of Shit”

    So says the master of the art form after a snippet in which Jim disagrees with JH delusions about the memo. Hankey retorts “If Bush was contacted it was because he was in charge of the anti-Castro Cubans.” Remember what McBride said to me at the end of Part I folks. I don’t need to remind you all that we have written.

    1H:44 Min: David Morales JM Wave Boss Again

    Morales was good pals with his boss Ted Shackley. Hankey’s pals at Murder Solved must be blue in the face explaining this sort of stuff to him. They have a write up about him here.

    1H:48 Min: “All This Shit About Dulles”

    “Jim has gone on with all of this shit about whether Dulles really had any intelligence background or not I mean what has that got to do with anything? And when do we get to the real substance of the movie the mountain of evidence I am putting together”

    There are a lot of fools out there dribbling all manner of gibberish. Nevertheless, even individuals as inept as Fetzer do not find Dulles’ extensive intelligence background irrelevant. It was not Dulles’ ties to the Nazis that got him the DIrectorship. It was his long experince as an intel officer in World War I and II, the plan he submitted to Walter B. Smith to reorganize the CIA after World War 2 (which prompted Smith to make him Deputy DCI), and finally Smith falling ill and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, convincing Eisenhower to make Dulles the new Director. All of this material is in the record on the several books about the Dulles brothers. But not only has Hankey not read them. He actually seems to think its not even important for him to do so! And its arrogance and presumptuousness like this that allowed him to make over 40 errors of fact in the first version of his film. As for JH’s mountain of evidence he is putting together: he has to be kidding. He has not structured even a hillock.

    1H:49 Min: “What the Fuck”

    Hankey declares “What the fuck?” after a brief snippet of Jim explaining that Bush’s links to the agency and Cubans were hardly unique amongst the blue blood set. Jim names Clare Booth Luce and Bill Pawley as examples. This leaves an exasperated JH bellowing…“ But these guys didn’t get mentioned in this memo.” He forgets the fact George Bush does not have his name redacted. This indicates to anyone with half a brain he was hardly a CIA higher up. Since Hoover was very sensitive to such matters. Even if he was, it is hardly sensitive information if Captain William Edwards of the DIA was running the Cubans? Was Agent F.T Forsyth? They are mentioned as well. Also, if Hankey saying that there were no communications at all with the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, about any Cuban renegade attack on Castro to any backers of any Cuban cadres in the wake of JFK’s death?

    If Bush was head of the CIA in 1976, why didn’t he destroy this memo? Surely, someone of his all seeing, all evil pedigree would eradicate all vestiges of his earlier wrongdoings running the Anti-Castro Cuban programme. Hell the guy couldn’t even get rid of his banal correspondence with George DeMohrenschildt. I have to say it is rather odd Hankey has not bought that old chestnut up yet. Is it because CTKA crushed that dream before he could grab it?

    1H:52 Minutes: Hankey’s Last Stand

    JH has been building for this for close to two hours, or has it been his entire life?

    What follows is a ramble that will echo through eternity. Its power is such that it conjures up an image of an illusionist actually believing he is the Human Torch, and then setting himself alight, and leaping off the TSBD to fly away. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No folks it is just JH crashing and burning. Again.

    Anyhow, for your enjoyment, here are the highlights of what he screamed on the way down…

    Fuck you Jim DeYouhayneo! For Making me Think.

    “Fuck you Jim Deyouhayneo! He is not honest, he, he is not… an honest researcher and you shouldn’t pay any attention to anything that he says except that he may occasionally raise a point that is in fact worth investigating.

    And in fact makes us think about something harder than perhaps we have in the first place.”

    Hankey is essentially saying, “Fuck you Jim for making me think.” It is certainly an odd way of showing one’s appreciation. But shouldn’t John have done some thinking before he put together his film. And again, the article was not Jim’s. It was mine. Jim was just reading it.

    Hoover: the Subtle Hero of the Bush Memo

    “But Hoover wrote one memo and the memo that he wrote named George Bush and frankly I just love that he managed to write it in such a way he made it so innocent that it survived.”

    Wow, so is he actually saying that the document reads as it looks. If so, that is a complete somersault. He is now saying Hoover carefully coded the message so it could slip through Bush’s fingers. It’s a message only JH can see.

    Mark Lane Never Heard of GHWB

    “Mark Lane said he saw this memo when it was first discovered and he didn’t make anything of it because he had never heard of George Bush before. It didn’t draw Mark Lane’s attention in the least… but that’s why it survived.”

    Okay, Mark Lane is a prominent political and civil rights activist and lawyer. JFK is only one of his many interests. He has had more scrapes with the CIA than JH has had hot dinners. Yet Hankey is trying to say in the period 1985-1988 a time when knowledge of the document was growing, Lane had never heard of the ex-head of the CIA or George Bush, Reagan’s second, and Presidential candidate. With that logic, JH probably thinks Mondale won. He now returns to Hoover’s cunning ploy…

    Jim is “Full of Shit,” but Hoover is “Frigging Brilliant

    “Now if Hoover was in on the assassination why did he write this memo and well… Jim is just so full of shit. I can’t believe it. He does draw our attention into that question I think, at least he drew my attention to that question. That I haven’t thought about in a long time. Why did Hoover write this memo? You know that when Hoover died his files were immediately seized and destroyed. If he had put it in his files it wouldn’t have survived but he made it sound innocent and he sent it out again to all these people. I think the guys frigging brilliant.”

    I couldn’t be bothered telling the reader that earlier he had congratulated Hoover’s investigative ability. Something considered a joke in the modern era to all but JH. Nonetheless, we can see he is very keen on Hoover’s subtle abilities that once again all but JH the mystic can see or translate. But beyond that, consider this a bi tmore deeply. Is Hankey really saying what he seems to be saying? That Hoover wanted to expose the actual plotters of JFK’s death? Again, this is what happens when writers leap into the sea of the JFK case without doing their homework. Or even going to the corner library to pick up a book or two.

    Nothing could be furhter from the truth in this case. From the first day, Hoover was hard at work molding the cover up from the ground up. He never let up the pressure on framing Oswald. Not from the beginning until the end. At the end, he was trying to disguise what the Sylvia Odio story really meant. To go through every instance in which he did this would take a small book. In fact, many people think that the exposure of the FBI cover up in this case was the beginning of the end of Hoover’s impenetrable image as a crime stopper. (Of which, most would say he never really was. Except maybe Johnny Boy.) But now, all of that work by say Tony Summers and Curt Gentry will have to reevaluated. Because John Hankey says the FBI memo has a much deeper meaning than anyone has ever given it. Even Joe McBride. Hoover was talking in codes I guess. Codes that only Hankey could decipher. And maybe Fetzer.

    John Hankey the Measure of Rationality

    Then comes something that really had to be heard to be believed. Consider the following:

    “Generally speaking I try to avoid saying things that I think that are so out there that they will reflect badly on everything else that I say.”

    Can Hankey really have this little self-knowledge? I hate to say it John but that horse has already bolted. And it left you on the ground. Indeed anybody who has read Parts I & II of this article, and three others at CTKA would see the bizarreness of the above statement. It was nice to know that before JH made this hilarious comment, you agreed with Jim that your theory of Bush threatening Hoover in his office with a dart gun was irresponsible and stupid.

    The Ridiculous CTKA Conspiracy

    But he is not done. Hankey’s final tirade accuses CTKA of launching a conspiracy against him. He bizarrely claims that different versions of his videos were not available at the time I wrote my first article. As you will see I am in awe of JH saying this stuff. It is a sociopathic, face saving and utterly dishonest argument. As one will see, JH himself was the very person who sent out his documentary and created different versions of it.

    The Ring Master Lisa Pease Part 1

    Why Hankey gets angry about anyone distributing his videos is curious. Is he secretly ashamed? He alleges Lisa Pease disseminated the video. This begs the question: why would Lisa want to promote anything of his. She, like any CTKA contributor, thinks Hankey’s work sucks. Was she distributing the video to discredit JH?

    Now again, please sit down before you read this wild conspiracy theory. It makes Lamar Waldron look like an amateur.

    For Hankey now claims Lisa then sent the video to Jim, and during his interview with Len, Lisa was handing him notes.( Lisa and Jim were in different parts of LA that night.) Yet, despite Jim’s reviewing his lame “Dark Legacy”, he then claims Jim has never seen his movie “JFK II”? What on earth is he trying to suggest here? If Jim actually sat down and watched the film, he would agree with JH? Wow, that is incredible logic considering Jim has seen both “JFK II” and “Dark Legacy.” Jim edited my articles and rechecked my facts. Threefore, it is impossible for him not to have watched JFK II. And he did at at my instigation, not Lisa’s. Hankey is not just delusional about whe he is, he is now creating wild paranoid plots to distract from the shoddiness of his own work.

    “For the record, and to repeat what jim has said on the air, this is how I came to write my first essay on Hankey’s film. One night I began to send Jim a series of questions based upon my viewing of Hankey’s documentary. Even though I was not as well versed in Kennedy matters back then, I sensed some of the facts in the film were either wrong or hyperbolic. So I sent a series of questions about these disputed matters to Jim so he could settle the matters. After about four of my queries I saw that indeed, my doubt was well founded since Jim, in each instance, stated that the info I was sending to him was wrong. Finally, in exasperation, he said, “Where are you getting this malarkey?”

    I told him: “Its from Hankey’s film.”

    Jim then watched the film, and we decided that someone had to critique this since it would mislead to many people. This is one of the functions of CTKA. To expose flatulence and pretension on both sides: the Krazy Kid Oswald types, and those who advocate ill founded conspiracies.

    He Doesn’t Mention Prison Planet

    There were five people in total he sent the movie to Lisa Pease, his brother, Kris Millegan, and Wim Dankbaar. He plays dumb and say’s “I think I mentioned them all.” The fifth was Alex Jones and Prison Planet. If not JH is probably wondering how their logo got on the front of his production.

    Lisa Pease Ring Master Part II (This is Even More Nutty).

    He now says I, the writer of the article that drove him mad, I am just a straw man in all of this. Apparently there is no way I could have seen it without Lisa sending it to me. In other words, I was part of Lisa’s conspiracy.

    According to the Wayback Machine, the version of JH’s JFK II that I used to review “JFK II” and linked to Google Video, has now disappeared rather suspiciously. One can see it had been posted to Google Video in at least 2006. (See the screen shot below)

    Table 2: Hankey’s Deleted Video Posted on 2006

    seamus 02

    On the Education Forum there is a post dating from August 2006 from a guy called Wade Rhodes discussing the very “JFK II” video. Rhodes, by the way, had used the same link I had. It is also important to note what Rhodes asks concerning Alex Jones and the Prison Planet disclaimer on Hankey’s earlier versions.

    Table 3: JFK II-2007 on Google Video

    seamus 03

    Anyhow, just do a Google video search for “JFK II: The Bush Connection.” The earliest YouTube entry now appears to be Jan 9, 2007. Note underneath there are different versions by different people. Furthermore, there is one from Mar 12, 2009.

    All of the above dates I have discussed, 2006, 2007, and March 2009 are way, way, way before I began my first Hankey take down, which CTKA published in early 2010. I had worked on JH for 3-4 months prior, in 2009. I have no idea how it got viral in the period 2003-2006. Jones’ operation was still growing. One presumes it was posted to a forum or linked to his webpage at some point. Some crazed people obviously liked it and bingo.

    Two major problems

    1. JH has accused us at one time or another of circulating unreleased editions that we somehow apprehended. As seen, JH has had “JFK” out and about for some time. Who created all the different versions that were available before September-October 2009 when I began? Were JH’s fans so concerned about JH’s content they made their own subtractions, or were they concerned about time? I don’t know. But the idea of Lisa Pease, cutting up JH’s video’s to make a better presentation or decrease its length is absurd (see the different lengths below)
    2. Problem one, assumes JH was not also promoting JFK II prior to my starting to write my first CTKA essay in September-October. Noooo JH never promoted JFK II at all according to the great man. It was us, Lisa Pease or CTKA.

    Table 4: Different Lengths of “JFK” all Publically Available

    seamus 04

    Well it turns out John Hankey was promoting JFK II. On Black Op Radio twice circa 2005, 2006, and also 2009. It was the latter recording on BOR (show # 424 that eventually helped spur me into what I am still doing now: correcting the ersatz record of JH.

    Conclusion on JH’s JFK II Videos

    People reply to criticism in different ways. Some take it upon themselves to improve. Some take it personally and resent the message. Hankey is in the latter group. For he now maligns Lisa Pease to cover his own behind. He has been less than candid about who distributed the videos since this information seems to be in plain sight. He seems to have edited the videos himself on the advice of others. John Hankey was also promoting his film two years before he released it. I am sure he made noises elsewhere, but I cannot be bothered tracking them down. Nothing should surprise me about John Hankey anymore – but this “CTKA conspiracy angle” is bizarre behavior even for him.

    Here Endeth the Lesson

    Well thankfully, it is over. Fetzer as deluded as ever, and without a trace of sarcasm, now announces, “Hankey prevailed in this exchange.” The reality is one can clearly see JH was defeated by mere voice samples. In his battle with an inanimate adversary, one can see he manufactured events, and corrupted CTKA’s own research for his own means. He then exaggerated, abused, smeared and manufactured again.

    I wish this was all over and initially it was fun. But it is extremely tedious and I feel sorry for Hankey.

    I will catch you up when I discuss JH and Zhou En – Lai.


    Part 1

    Part 2

    Part 4


    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    “Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

  • Master Class with John Hankey, II: The Debate Debacle: An Introduction


    If you have not caught Part I, you will see John Hankey has featured in three previous CTKA articles. Including this new batch of essays, he now has a grand total of six studies detailing his myriad pratfalls.

    Last year Hankey and Gary King were pestering Jim DiEugenio for a live debate concerning CTKA’s articles on Hankey. They appeared to be at odds with Jim’s appearance on Black Op Radio discussing my article. Indeed, for some rather callow folk it appears that Jim’s discussing my article means I did not write it and Jim did. I take it as a compliment. I always aim to be as diligent as Jim DiEugenio.

    Jim appeared on Black Ops Radio simply because I did not want to go on. Jim is an old hand with interviews, and I felt he would better present my case. Furthermore, Len Osanic and Jim go way back and they are adept at each other’s styles. Clearly, Hankey’s work had me riled. Quite clearly, John has no idea of how things work here at CTKA.

    Jim did a lot for of my first ever CTKA piece. Because he and John Kelin had to edit some fifty thousand words of text and then HTML format the finished article. As I had little access to Jim Hougan, and the best Watergate literature, Jim helped me out with the faux Nixon, Hunt, and Bush stuff Hankey used. This is not unique. Should Hankey ever write for CTKA (something of a longshot, admittedly) he would get Jim’s helpful expertise, as all contributing writers, in particular baby faces as I was, received. Now, depending on the topic I occasionally help people out with their first time articles. It is a small community and it is what we do.

    The Ballad of the Rejected Prima Donna

    If we count, the introduction t the debate by Fetzer and John Hankey’s presentation, the show is nearly two hours long. What is funny about all of Hankey’s cries of victimization is the fact he can jump on any crank supporting radio show, write on any crank blog, and debate his case. What perturbs Hankey however, is that this crank nexus is shallow. His ideas are just as good as the next hack that comes along.

    CTKA is highly regarded by genuine JFK researchers. Serious researchers do not engage with the likes of John Hankey, nor his pals at the “Oswald Innocence Project.” Apparently, John Hankey really wanted to be a name. He fooled himself into believing he was one until he got snapped out by those who really understand the field and really are careful about the facts of the JFK case. I have likened his behaviour to that of some deluded amateur singer shot down on X-Factor. As a result of his rejection, he certainly made a name for himself. Just not in the deluded way he had imagined.

    To save you the pain of listening to Hankey’s rather loose interpretation version of a debate, I have listed the highlights as I heard them. So sit , grab a coffee, tea, or beer, and giggle along with us.

    Name the Time and Date

    Radio host Gary King really wanted to make a splash for the 50th by having Jim or I debate John Hankey. We were very busy at the time. Indeed, we both emailed him saying when either of us were able that we would be more than willing to debate him. I did not have the energy for it debate preparation, and the last thing I wanted at the time was to do more JFK stuff. Sure, anything involving Hankey is some fun, but in many ways, it is also exhausting because of the sheer amount of crap shovelling.

    Then I eventually got a second wind and prepared for the debate. But I noticed someone affiliated to Hankey and King had put a profile of me on Zimbio as the DCI of the CIA. I suspected something was up, and after listening to Gary’s show, I felt his promises of a moderated debate were empty and Hankey would run rough on him. I was out of there… at least until now. If John wants a piece, I will give him all the CTKA he can handle.

    Hell, I will even find a decent neutral venue for us to chat if he so wants. Sorry John and Gary but after being named as head of the CIA by your rabid pals it just would not feel right to cooperate with you. At the end of this overlong piece, (which you can blame on almost two hours of Hankey’s rant) I was left with a host of questions I would like to have answered in a debate with him.

    Questions for a Debate With Mr Hankey

    Were I to debate the man, I would like the following questions to be tabled for moderation. I will probably kick myself for not remembering more; however, he has made so many calls it is impossible to keep track of them all. These questions come from CTKA’s original reviews and essays, not to mention Hankey’s new rants. I anticipate this list will grow.

    Hankey’s Deletions

    • Why did Hankey (JH) drop his Roman numerals line for “J” equalling three (i.e., Barbara III GHWB’s plane in WWII) did CTKA have anything to do with this?
    • Why has JH never admitted splicing interview footage of Governor Connally?
    • Why has JH dropped the angle of Connally being involved in the assassination, but when he was debating Jim on the Murder Solved forum, he still backed it. Where is that position now and did CTKA force his re-evaluation?
    • Why has JH apparently dropped the bogus body alteration in the plane idea he pushed in “JFK II” and “Dark Legacy.”
    • Why has JH not explained how it was he who proved it was GHWB in the Hoover/Bush memo before Joseph McBride in 1985 – 1988?
    • Why did Hankey insist the Bay of Pigs was launched from around Cal Say when it was launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua? Why did he drop this angle?
    • Why has Hankey dropped the Nixon/LBJ phone call as evidence of Nixon discussing the plot.
    • Why does Hankey rely on a known unreliable source like Paul Kangas?

    John Hankey on Literature & Documents

    • How could JH say I misquoted Gaeton Fonzi on Murder Solved when it was clear JH had never even read Fonzi’s book “The Last Investigation?”
    • Why did JH say David Talbot’s book “Brothers” confirmed JH’s thesis of mafia/CIA plots against Castro when Talbot used sources known since the 70’s?
    • Was JFK II, cited in Talbot’s book?
    • Why did Hankey say he only made one mistake concerning the CIA in Guatemala a few years ago but now admits two more errors with Nixon while denying all the rest? Yet, he now denies he made a mistake about Guatemala again?
    • Why did Hankey confuse “Rush to Judgement” with” Plausible Denial” in a written piece after all these years of chattering on about the latter?
    • Why is JH so special he can read the supposedly hidden messages behind the Hoover/Bush memo when Mark Lane and Joseph McBride cannot?
    • If the Hoover/Bush memo was so important, why didn’t GHWB track it down and destroy it as head of the CIA, before it ever got out?

    Prescott Bush/George Bush and Dealey Plaza

    • What evidence does JH have for George Bush being part of a hit team in Dealey Plaza? Surely, he is not using the photo?
    • Why didn’t George give a false job if he was arrested as Jim Braden (Eugene Hale Brading) was?
    • If PB were the architect of Kennedy’s demise, why would he entrust the mission to his son as who then faced arrest?
    • Where is the evidence his son trained covert operational mechanic?
    • Marita Lorenz is dubious as she has never mentioned meeting or seeing GWHB, nor did Frank Sturgis or Hunt.
    • The CIA did not use just two boats in the BOP invasion as JH said. Did GHWB name the others?
    • When has CTKA said GHWB was not involved with the CIA?
    • Why did JH misrepresent Joseph Trento and Bill Corson concerning Zhou En-Lai and PB?
    • Why did Hankey change the dinner dates and reasons behind the dinner Mellon arranged for Dulles and let PB tag along with?
    • Why did JH give fake identities to members of GHWB’s fellow Skull and Bones peers?
    • Why has JH dropped his Skull and Bones angle? Did CTKA have anything to do with it?
    • Why did JH say no Kennedy family members have spoken out about a plot to kill Kennedy when a cousin had, not to mention Talbot’s book. Had Hankey read “Brothers” at the time?
    • What evidence does JH have for Allen Dulles only getting the job as head of the CIA simply because he was a Nazi sympathizer?
    • Why does he ignore evidence of Dulles extensive history in intelligence work?
    • What evidence did JH have for their being no CIA operatives in the Nixon Whitehouse?
    • Why does JH call Jim DiEugenio “Jim Deeyouhayneo.”
    • Why have Mark Lane and the late Fletcher Prouty, while believing Bush was involved in the BOP never said he was running the operation?
    • Where is the documented evidence of GHWB running the Bay of Pigs?
    • Where did Mark Lane say he had never heard of George Bush?

    The Prouty/Lane Blame Game

    • Why does JH blame Lane and Prouty for his own mistakes, when there are numerous other sources Hankey has used, yet, he does not blame for his information.
    • Why does JH criticise CTKA on irrelevant points and arguments; nevertheless, he feels free to includes actor Bruce Willis’ opinions on a conspiracy to kill JFK?

    Miscellaneous Questions for Mr Hankey

    • Why could John Hankey not correct or answer one by one all the questions I asked of him at Murder Solved?
    • What evidence other than CTKA disagreeing with his analysis does JH have to prove we are CIA? Has he heard of libel?
    • Why does JH think that misappropriating Operation 40 with Alpha 66, and Operation Mongoose are irrelevant?
    • Why did JH claim he has been researching for 49 and 50 years at least 2-3 years before the 50th anniversary?
    • When has CTKA ever endorsed Barr McClellan, or Johnson and Hoover being plotters in the crime?
    • Why does JH blame CTKA for distributing his video when it was widely available years before CTKA reviewed it and Hankey was promoting it?
    • Why would Lisa Pease want to distribute JH work?
    • Why did JH not admit to sending his video to Alex Jones?
    • Why did JH hide his reply to Jim DiEugenio’s 20 mistakes he observed in the first half of his debate at “Murder Solved” on his website; furthermore, why did he delete Jim’s 20 point argument?
    • Why did JH feel the need to misrepresent Jim making up a comment JH actually made on Black Ops Radio?

    Part 1

    Part 3

    Part 4


    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    “Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

  • Master Class with John Hankey, I: A Note for the Hankey Noviates

    Master Class with John Hankey, I: A Note for the Hankey Noviates


    Jim DiEugenio and I had no idea what we would kick up when I wrote my first article for CTKA. Since then my name and CTKA’s have been nearly synonymous with John Hankey. I do not know how I feel about that. I personally prefer that people discuss my article on James Bamford, or JFK and the MJ-12 hoax. One thing I do know is that Hankey hates being associated with Jim, CTKA, and myself. Considering how bizarre Hankey’s work has been of late, I really don’t know how to interpret that. This present essay was going to be short piece. But it ended up as a three-part essay discussing the latest hilarious installments in Hankey’s (and Jim Fetzer’s) career.


    Here are the three Hankey related articles and a reply to one of Mr. Fetzer’s silly articles.

    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    “Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum

    There are another three new additions (including this) I shall link to later.


    Veterans Today a new Hankey Haven

    In Part I, we learn he has teamed up with Jim Fetzer and written a spectacularly ridiculous article on the silly “Veterans Today” site. We discuss his new positions and get feedback from Joseph McBride. In Part II, to celebrate the 50th last year he debated a tape recording of Jim DiEugenio and still lost the argument. Part III discusses his interpretation of the Zhou En-Lai assassination attempt and his delusions concerning Prescott Bush, whom according to Hankey, was the real power behind the CIA.

    Fetzer, Hankey’s Ally against CTKA Oppression

    CTKA, essentially set Fetzer’s JFK agenda in all of this Hankey imbroglio. And almost anything we criticize Fetzer seems to admire e.g. Philip Nelson, Russ Baker. So much so, he writes about us much at Veteran’s Today. At last count, he has at least five articles defending the honor of numerous jokers we have attacked. He also has two Hankey inspired essays.

    The first article “Was George Bush Involved in the Assassination of JFK?” was a belated reply to the Bush articles we have posted here. Hankey co-authored the piece with Fetzer. My reply to Mr Fetzer’s lame critique is linked above. You will note that Mr Fetzer could not reply to any of my questions concerning his own argument against me. Furthermore, the reader will see Fetzer asked Jim to call me off in the very fight that he started, with his silly article.

    Hankey: The Gift That Just Keeps Giving

    John Hankey’s central illusion revolves around a certain FBI memo which, according to him, contains mystical properties. These properties have elevated GHWB into the realms of Kennedy assassination kingpin. Nevertheless, the person who discovered it has recently challenged Hankey’s interpretation of the document.

    Before I get to that tasty morsel, let us explore some new Hankeyian standards.

    First, perhaps in reaction to CTKA, he has dropped many of his bogus angles. To list all of the stuff he has changed since we began tracking him closely back in January 2010, is just plain boring. He is still misappropriating Mark Lane’s work badly, so badly he now believes Lane’s Rush to Judgement was the book that mentioned the Hunt and Bush connection. Consider the following:

    “But then Mark Lane, in Rush to Judgment, did the fabulous work of demonstrating, and in fact persuading a jury, that E. Howard Hunt, a major lieutenant in the CIA’s “misguided anti-Castro Cuban” program, was in Dallas and involved in the assassination. With this background – with this framework to guide the researcher-it was then possible to assemble the evidence linking Bush to Hunt.”

    The book he is discussing is not Rush to Judgment, It’s actually Plausible Denial. If he had said this in an interview, I could understand; we all make mistakes live. What I do not understand is he actually wrote this down and has included a photo of the reprinted 1992 version. Everyone knows Rush to Judgement was based off Lane’s posthumous defense brief for Oswald. Hankey’s excuse will be there is some mention of the Hunt case in a new edition of Rush to Judgement. Which is ludicrous as it is hardly the book’s topic. Here is a shot of his comment.

    Table 1: Hunt’s Trial Main Point of Rush to Judgment

    seamus 01

    Hankey simply does not know the contents of the book. Anyhow, what is scary is my examination of John Hankey’s new angles has barely started. After this short essay, I have an interview to annotate and Bill Corson to straighten out.

    Bogus George Bush, the Vengeful Nut Sack, and Ed Lansdale

    Hankey now leaps onto Russ Baker’s book. He is trying to pull Russ’s old line about Bush using his political campaign in 1963 as a figleaf for his covert activities that day. Hankey has never really pushed this angle too heavily. Indeed, I recall he initially dismissed the Bush outside the depository angle, and I admired him for that. Yet he now clutches at straws about an old statement from Roger Craig discussing the arrest of an “Independent oil operator from Houston.”

    “Jim also asked me about the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day. I told him I knew of twelve arrests, one in particular made by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department. The man Vaughn arrested was coming from the Dal-Tex Building across from the Texas School Book Depository. The only thing which Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas. The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last that he saw or heard of the suspect.”

    Considering how many oilmen from Houston there are to call him “Bush” is slightly selective. Indeed, Hankey’s expert analysis begs some questions…

    • Vaughn offered no physical description whatsoever. How could anyone know who this man was?
    • In Hankey’s debacle of a debate, he insists GHWB was arrested with a “frigging gun in his hand” departing dramatically from his VT article.
    • If Bogus Bush got arrested outside the Daltex building why is he supposedly outside the Texas School Book Depository un-cuffed.
    • Why does the blurred image not give any indication of a bloke in a suit and tie, Bogus
    • George’s white shirt would have stuck out in the shadows?
    • Would Russ Baker approve of this take on his ID?
    • In the Garrison book, On the Trail of the Assassins (page 205-206). Garrison describes the arrest of two men one was arrested running out of the Daltex building was picked up by Police and disappeared. This is supposedly a panicked GHWB in Hankey land. The other man arrested was inside the building, Jim Braden, whose real name was Eugene Hale Brading. He claimed he was there on oil business and was based in LA. He was obviously lying if so why didn’t bogus George give a phony business are we led to believe the police took his real name.

    Hankey has now added the alleged photos of Ed Lansdale in Dealey Plaza that day into his lexicon. Jim DiEugenio is a little more skeptical concerning photo identifications in Dealey Plaza than I am. I have always been a little more open to the idea some images may depict Ed Lansdale and another depicting Orlando Bosch. However, I happily sit on the fence with these images, my belief in a conspiracy does not hinge on their being in these photos.

    Hence, where I agree with Jim is that for every balanced observation of a suspect there are a host of irresponsible writers making all kinds of discoveries. An example of cheapening the Lansdale ID is the addition of an individual who is clearly not GHWB. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg; it seems as if every major U.S. Cold War era crook can be identified as being there, not to mention every character in the Oswald saga.

    Another problem is some like to have their cake and eat it with any photo or film. A case is Fetzer’s hypocritical and goofy OIP (Oswald Innocence Project). Fetzer insists upon the veracity of the Lansdale and Bush images. Yet if the conspirators supposedly rubbed Oswald’s face off the steps at the TSBD (a main point of the OIP) then surely, the defacement of suspects like Lansdale and Bush to protect their identities would be a matter of routine.

    Hankey rounds off another emphatically poor performance with Bruce Willis’ belief in a conspiracy. This is another favourite party trick of his. Bar a celebrity having the balls to discuss the topic. Willis is cosmically irrelevant to JH premise about anything what Bruce Willis believes about a conspiracy. Yet, the maestro somehow has the temerity to call the mass of evidence we use to bury him under irrelevant?

    Hooke, Lies, and Stinker

    Much of this information the sophomoric Richard Hooke discussed in his laughable article “Did George Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team”, it will be covered in my upcoming review of Phil Nelson’s book. Nevertheless, he is worth a quick mention as it was Hooke’s coloration of the Altgen’s image that gave us the multi headed blue nut sack called Bogus George and identifying George ‘W’ Bush himself in Dealey Plaza! Now if that is not ridiculous enough, Hooke also claims Mac Wallace was a Skull & Bones man alongside George Bush. Hankey once had a real fetish for the Skull & Bones angle before CTKA came along.

    Hooke’s evidence is a photo of someone who looks vaguely similar to Wallace. After looking around, I deduced the person to be one the following individuals: John Erwin Caulkins, William James Connelly, Jr, George Cook III, Richard Elwood Jenkins, Howard Sayre Weaver, and one Richard Gerstle Mack.

    Well as it turns out, I was able to contact the relatives of Mr. Gerstle Mack.

    “Dick was a member of Skull and Bones and was my uncle. He is the 3rd person on the left in the Skull and Bones photo you all are speculating about.” (Email Gerstle and Sloss Family Reunion 8/4/2014)

    I was then given the rundown on who Gerstle Mack was. He was one of the first Jewish people to join Skull and Bones. He didn’t rule the world either. He invented a baby carrier called the “Hikeapoose.” The Bush family would help him out with his medical expenses in later life. Wow, he sounds, and looks like Mac Wallace doesn’t he?

    Hooke, a man truly qualified to stand beside Fetzer and Hankey, has no evidence of Wallace attending Yale; dare I say there is no evidence of Wallace at Yale. Furthermore, Bonesmen are all tapped from the same year. Most of the lads back in the day were blue bloods that had familial connections to previous Bones members. Wallace was born in 1921, and George in 1924. Hence, it is impossible for Wallace and Bush to have been playmates.

    There is a good takedown (bar the incorrect date) of this ludicrous scenario at the “Oswald Innocence Campaign is a Fraud.”

    “Just long enough for him to be accepted to Yale in the first place, of which there is no proof, and then accepted into the Skull and Bones society, of which there is no proof, just long enough to be photographed for the 1947 edition of the Skull and Bones society? And then he said, okay, I got into the photograph, bye-bye, and went back to Texas? He didn’t stick around and graduate from Yale? He decided the Univ of Texas at Austin was a better school?”

    I could not have said it better myself.

    Hankey is now trying to forge himself something of a new identity as an anti-LBJ did it researcher. Unfortunately his reputation has been ruined by his inane dabbling in the Bush zones. From what I have seen, he has been cribbing a lot of his anti-LBJ stuff from CTKA anyway. Nevertheless, this is not the point. The main issue is Fetzer’s acceptance of Hankey’s stance.

    Addendum: John Please Read The Following

    Here it is my grand finale… at least for Part I anyway.

    John Hankey has long been fixated with the supposed mystical properties of the discovery by Joseph McBride of a Bush/CIA document. But Hankey has misconstrued this memo and Mark Lane’s book “Plausible Denial” that published it so often and so badly, he has created his own nearly solipsisitc unvierse.

    Mark Lane

    Answering questions on a 2/4/2012 thread at the Education Forum Mark Lane said the following concerning Bush’s non-appearance in Rush to Judgement, the Hoover/Bush memo, and E Howard Hunt’s role that day.

    “No, I did not mention George Herbert Walker Bush in Rush to Judgment. I did report in Plausible Denial (pp. 329-33) the facts about Bush, the former director of the CIA and later president, and his suspicious engagement which demonstrates that he had been involved in the CIA before the assassination of President Kennedy — a statement that he falsely denied — as well as his likely involvement during 1961 with the CIA’s planned Bay of Pigs invasion. I was asked why I have not spoken much about that subject. I published it in full in the New York Times bestselling book, Plausible Denial, and I discussed it during lectures on the Kennedy Assassination. Since I was not asked by network TV to discuss anything in Plausible Denial, I did what I could.”

    Lane also commented on E Howard Hunt’s role. Note he does not back the idea of Hunt being a sniper. Or actually being in Dealey Plaza that day despite the Trento memorandum, Lane appears to believe it was a limited hangout.

    “I don’t know where Hunt and Sturgis were during the shooting, but I know they were in Dallas the day before the shooting helping to plan the operation. If they had any sense of self preservation, they got out of town before the shots were fired.”

    Now ain’t that a kick in the head for Hankey’s hypothesis all based on Lane’s book?

    Joseph McBride

    The Deep Politics Forum is a fascinating place with some crackling reseaerchers, including Joe McBride. McBride is a jouralist/author in the vein of the illustirous Jim Hougan. In The Dark Legacy of John Hankey I quoted the following from Joe:

    “Bush’s duties with the CIA in 1963 – whether he was an agent for example or merely an “asset” – cannot be determined from Hoover’s memo.”

    At the DPF I emailed Joe at the start of the year and asked him about Hankey’s use of the document that he (McBride) had unearthed. This is what he said in reply: “I have read the Hankey piece. It is bizarre what he has done with the information.”

    If you do not believe me John, contact Joe. I am sure he would love to hear about how after all the hard work he did identifying it as GHWB, that it was actually you who destroyed the idea of the memo not referring to him. Can you remember saying the following…

    “I will give myself props for destroying Bush’s claim that the memo did not refer to him.”

    Prop away John, prop, prop, prop away, and deny you ever said it.


    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

  • John Hankey Marches Onward and Downward


    with Frank Cassano


    Introduction

    As readers will recall, Seamus Coogan did a long analytical piece on Hankey’s documentary, JFK II. That negative critique stung Hankey and his followers – yes, he does have some, though not quite as many after as before. Hankey posted a reply at the web site: JFK Murder Solved, and then Jim DiEugenio replied and there was then a rebuttal round.

    On that forum, Hankey admitted that he was embarrassed by the sheer number of errors – over 20 – that he had made in an 85 minute film, that was supposed to be “a documentary.” He then said that he could not hire a fact-checker. Yet, as Jim pointed out: What had prevented him from going to the library and picking up say, three books on the JFK case? This would have saved him the subsequent embarrassment. He then tried to save the day by saying that the accumulation of mistakes exposed by Seamus did not touch on his major thesis. Anyone who reads Seamus’ essay will understand that this is a dubious and face-saving assertion.

    At first, Hankey apparently did not understand the hit his credibility had sustained; though later he did, since he now has shifted tactics. He now says that he only made – please sit down before you read this – all of one error! This is simply a deception on his part. As anyone can comprehend by reading Coogan’s essay. The litany of errors he made is staggering. And understand, that essay was cut down by about 20 pages on the grounds of overkill. The total amount of pratfalls was more like 50. A fact Hankey cannot admit to today.

    His other new tactic is to actually accuse Jim DiEugenio – again, sit down before you read this – of being a CIA operative. This is simply nutty. No one writing today has accused the CIA more often and more strongly of being behind the JFK murder. Can Hankey really be ignorant of this? If so, it indicates why his work is so full of errors. But because CTKA published Seamus’ essay, this is what Hankey is reduced to. Even though it was Coogan – not DiEugenio – who wrote the original piece.

    Hankey’s new tactics were revealed on an Internet radio show called The Corbett Report. After his appearance, several readers let us know about what he had said. Frank Cassano (and others) wrote the host a letter and Jim DiEugenio left a call. On January 2nd of the new year, Mr. Corbett then granted Jim and Seamus an opportunity to respond. (Click here to download an mp3 file of Jim’s and Seamus’ appearance on The Corbett Report.)

    John Hankey’s statement below, made in an interview with podcast host James Corbett, shows the limited scope of his logic, and is a fine way to begin this brief examination of Hankey’s latest faux pas on the show of December 4th, 2010. For those of you new to this debate, I refer you to my review of Hankey’s appalling documentary, JFK II and Jim DiEugenio’s reviews of Dark Legacy and Hankeyan clone Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets.

    The Hankeyan Strategy:  “Everything I get – all the major points – are from Plausible Denial.”

    Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial was published in 1991. Since that time there have been many published JFK books and much updated research. Lane’s book is an important contribution that did much to sharpen the point that E. Howard Hunt did not have an alibi for where he was on 11/22/63. Which leads to the question: Why did he need one? When combined with the fact that his friend and colleague, David Phillips, admitted to his brother that he was in Dallas that day – well, that is quite interesting. When you add in a third point, that it was James Angleton that proffered the memo saying that Hunt did need such an alibi – well, that is even more than interesting. It’s compelling. Hankey, however, completely leaves out the latter two facts. He then tries to connect Hunt, not to Phillips or Angleton, but to Richard Nixon and George Bush. Even though Hunt did not work for Nixon until ten years after the assassination. And there is no proof that Bush and Hunt worked with each other at all. It is only a Hankeyan presumption.

    Now, although Nixon figures prominently in the Hankey film as part of the JFK plot, contrary to what Hankey says above, he is not part of the plot – in any way – in Lane’s book. (Hankey seems to have borrowed his material on Nixon from Paul Kangas, a notoriously unreliable and sensationalistic researcher.) But Hankey tried to save the day by telling Corbett that Lane’s book also implicates George Bush in the JFK case – a distortion that Corbett seemed to accept.

    The problem is that Lane does not mention George Bush in the main text of the book. And that is where he actually discusses his investigation of the JFK case. He only mentions him in the Epilogue. And he references here the famous Joseph McBride articles in The Nation. McBride, of course, talked about the J. Edgar Hoover memo which showed Bush’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. (And those of you familiar with my earlier treatment of Hankey will know he mangled that memo beyond all normal usage.) What Hankey did with Corbett was to extract one sentence from this Epilogue to provide as evidence that Lane and he are actually “soul brothers.” In this Epilogue, Lane was trying to jab up present interest in the JFK case. So he asked if there was any person on the scene today with a relation to the “Kennedy drama.” (Lane, p. 329) He then discusses Bush and the McBride articles. And he adds that Bush knew George DeMohrenschildt and Bush may have been involved in the Bay of Pigs. (Ibid, pgs. 332-33) And that is it. So for Hankey to state that somehow Lane’s book presaged his interest in, and use of, Nixon and Bush in the JFK assassination is simply not accurate.

    Hankey has adopted an interesting strategy of naming respected sources such as Fletcher Prouty and Lane and then claiming that people like Jim DiEugenio and myself are unwilling to criticize them, choosing instead to pick on him – which is stretching things. Since in my original article, I did jab at Lane for using Marita Lorenz at face value. Hankey also tries to insinuate that we are antagonistic towards them, another patently false allusion since CTKA respects the work of both authors as seen in numerous articles. Finally, his last recourse is exceptionally creative: He seeks to combine these factors and then literally blame it all on Lane and Prouty:

    And anyone as brilliant about his facts as Seamus is, knows it. But he attacks me, and pretends that Mark Lane and Fletcher Prouty have nothing to do with any of this. I don’t blame him for not wanting to take on Mark Lane. But this pretense is not merely cowardly. It is fundamentally, and darkly, dishonest.

    In retrospect, we really shouldn’t have edited out some points in the original Hankey piece. But due to the originals mammoth 52 pages, some things went to the cutting room floor. One of the things deleted was another thing Hankey has failed to give serious thought to: If Prouty’s assertions about the Bush connection in the naming of the Bay of Pigs vessels as the Barbara and Houston are correct, Prouty never made a big song and dance about it. Nor did Prouty elevate Bush into the realms of the planners for the Kennedy assassination. But Hankey has. Prouty showed common sense with his allegations and didn’t go off on tangents. It is people like Hankey who inadvertently damage reputations like Prouty’s by taking Prouty’s positions to extremes that were never intended.

    Finally, there is this: Prouty and Lane have brought to the table much of benefit to all serious researchers. Lane has written three valuable books on the case: Rush to Judgment, A Citizen’s Dissent, and Plausible Denial. Prouty has written a classic book on the CIA – The Secret Team – and a good book on Kennedy’s assassination and his intent to withdraw from Vietnam – JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. There is much, much more to both men than simply Hunt, Nixon being depicted with a rifle in hand, George Bush being named in a Hoover memo, allegations that Bush named some boats used in the Bay of Pigs, and the Christchurch Star. Hankey, who has brought next to nothing to the table, grossly misrepresented or overstated what they and other authors have said or written. This is a far more serious offense than any small differences of opinion with them over the naming of two ships used in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

    Another bizarre and immature Hankey strategy is to admit fault in his data collection, but then to say DiEugenio and I are either nit-picking over minor details that don’t threaten his main thesis, or to greatly minimize the number of errors he made in JFK II. These two issues intersect each other: because if you make literally dozens of errors, as Hankey did in JFK II, who can trust what you say at all? One thing that Hankey is aware of, and hoodwinks his few supporters into ignoring, is that every “minor” detail we pick up on, no matter how divergent (and he gets pretty diverse in his multiplicity of errors), is a building block to the foundation of his overall conclusion. And that he himself has included it, not us. When we include other pieces of information it is to show what Hankey has missed.

    Let us give the reader an idea of how Hankey has tried to counter the exposé of his error-filled film. When my long review first appeared, a discussion of it surfaced at the web site: JFK Murder Solved. An indiscriminating radio host named Michael Dell tried to minimize the myriad errors Hankey had made. (Dell had hosted Hankey, and obviously was stung by the fact that somehow he had not caught any of his litany of errors.) Hankey joined the discussion and admitted that he should have done a better job in his fact-checking. But somehow he did not have the budget for a researcher. Jim DiEugenio chimed in and added words to the effect: Well, can’t you drive to the nearest public library and pick up a few books to prevent you from taking so many pratfalls?

    On the Corbett show, Hankey has now organized a different defense against his failure to fact-check. He now tries to insinuate that the only mistake he made was that he said the CIA had killed Mossadgeh in the Iran coup of 1953. Let us call this for what it is: A deliberate lie to save face in public. That may be strong, but it is wholly justified. Why? Because just in that particular section of the early edit of JFK II, it was pointed out that he made another error: He implied that Jacobo Arbenz had died in the CIA coup the following year. Again, this was false. He did not die until 1971. Further, he also tried to imply that Prescott Bush was the guiding hand behind those two coups, plus the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 – which, for anyone who knows anything about the CIA, is patently false. Clearly, the Dulles brothers guided the first two operations, and Allen himself supervised the last.

    To show just how dishonest Hankey was on the Corbett show in this regard, let us go back to the thread on JFK Murder Solved. In the exchange with Hankey and Dell, Jim DiEugenio examined only the first 45 minutes of the film. From my review, he extracted nearly 20 factual errors! Or almost one per minute. And, as Jim further noted, the second half of the film is even more error-strewn than the first half, e.g., Hankey puts words in Bill Colby’s mouth that he never told the Church Committee. So for Hankey to say in public that he made only one error is simply knowingly deceitful.

    Another ploy that Hankey and some of his followers (like Michael Green) have developed is to call my essay “a hit piece.” This is ridiculous. In its traditional usage, that term means that a journalist or reporter is called in by his superiors and told words to the effect: Go out and wreck this story, or impugn this guy’s character – or both. In the traditional media, this often occurred. For example, the Los Angeles Times appointed a task force to go after the late Gary Webb and his generally accurate story about cocaine smuggling into Los Angeles by the Contras. Further back, in 1967, Walter Sheridan and NBC deliberately set out to wreck Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw. (Click here for the details.) No such thing happened here. After watching Hankey’s film, I was appalled by the many factual errors in it. I relayed some of them to Jim DiEugenio, not telling him they were a part of Hankey’s film. After about four of these, Jim asked me “Where are you getting these whoppers from?” I told him. I then suggested I do an essay on the film. So the process was just the opposite of what is considered a “hit piece.” Hankey’s film was so just so poor that it inspired a writer to correct the record. I was commissioned to do so by no one. I just wanted to set the record straight, and I wanted to raise the bar for the research community to shoot for. The surprise is that it took so long for anyone to do that – which tells you something about the quality control in the field.

    Another Hankey tactic is to portray critical comments as down-playing certain individuals’ roles or credentials, like say Oswald’s intelligence connections. I hate to tell him, but it isn’t a big deal anymore that Oswald was a low-level CIA operative and FBI informant. It’s no big deal Bush was associated with the CIA before he admitted he was; and therefore that the Hoover memorandum is not such a big deal either. Why? Because better researchers than Hankey have pored over this stuff for years and have drawn much the same conclusions. Conclusions utterly divergent from Hankey’s fantasies, e.g., fantasies like George Bush and two Cubans storming into Hoover’s office and threatening him with a flechette gun (a truly nutty proposition which Hankey prudently cut from the final edit of his film).

    10:44: “No members of the Kennedy’s family ever alleged there was an assassination plot.”

    Untrue, Kerry McCarthy spoke out about it at JFK Lancer in 1997.

    This is shaping up to be a vintage performance from Hankey here and this is an utterly hilarious statement. In my review of Hankey, there’s a statement by The King of Comedy in which he attested to a fan that David Talbot’s book Brothers backed his findings in the case.

    If you thought the above comments were a little exaggerated, then check this one out. It comes from an email exchange between Hankey and an online fan:

    I’m grateful that you called me at all. But it sounds like I’m better off to shut my mouth about what you’ve told me, since, like many true stories, it’s so incredible and the other evidence is there in plain sight anyway. This new book, Brothers, further corroborates all the CIA-trained Cubans and Mafia material in JFK II.

    Does he really think that his video JFK II was the first to expose the CIA-Mafia plots and their possible coordination with Cuban exiles? Did Hankey ever hear of Anthony Summers’ valuable book, originally titled Conspiracy? It was first published many, many years – even decades – before JFK II began to circulate. Further, how was David Talbot’s Brothers inspired by Hankey’s research? You will not see Hankey’s name in Talbot’s index. But you will see Summers’ name. (p. 476) But even that gives Hankey too much credit. For the Talbot book does not really outline any such conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

    There’s further evidence that Hankey has never even read Brothers. The entire book is based on the evidence from RFK’s closest confidants that he believed there was a high level conspiracy to kill his brother.

    16:57: Dulles, the Chief Sponsor of the Kennedy Hit

    The above section concerning Prescott’s dominion over Dulles (a key theme running throughout Hankey’s work) is very interesting stuff because Hankey soon back-flips and admits (extremely begrudgingly by the sound of his tone) that Dulles had been the king-pin of the JFK coup. This may be due to the drubbing given him by myself, Jim DiEugenio, and likely numerous others after his comments on Black Op Radio in 2009 that Dulles was Bush’s puppet.

    19:44: “I’ve been attacked recently by some very, very reputable people.”

    Apparently this is “rather chilling” because Hankey’s “evidence” is apparently “clear and overwhelming” – according to himself and “lots and lots of people who agree with me that if somebody’s challenging that, it throws into question their credibility.” This is astounding in its delusionary rationalization. The idea that Jim DiEugenio’s reputation in the research community, or at large, or CTKA’s credentials, or my own are in some way going to suffer when our work is compared to Hankey’s – well, what can one say to such nonsense?

    21:33: James Jesus Angleton Memorandum about Hunt

    Hankey gets something correct again. James Angleton did supply the Hunt memorandum about Howard Hunt needing an alibi for Dallas. But what he won’t like is that this is a correction that came from my piece. Re: 40:13 into his film:

    First, he says that the famous CIA memorandum explaining how they must provide Howard Hunt with an alibi for 11/22/63 was written by Director of Plans, Richard Helms. Yet according to his own source, it was written by James Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence. (Lane, p. 145)

    Of course Hankey has no idea that this memorandum (purportedly dated back to 1966) was leaked out during the closing phases of HSCA; nor that by 1978 Helms and Angleton were not formally employed by the agency. I should also add that in the same sentence I mentioned above, I also recall that I have never heard Hunt admit that he was an assassin. Hankey makes this vacant claim at a later stage of his “documentary.”

    23:34: Mark Lane writes, “All of the participants are dead except George Bush.”

    As mentioned above, this is not accurate. When Plausible Denial was published in 1991, two figures considered prominently involved in the assassination were alive: E. Howard Hunt and Richard Helms. Lane says so in the book on page 235, a few sentences before he even mentions George Bush. He never named Bush as a participant in the plot. But in the “Kennedy drama,” which is not the same thing. Hunt’s trial occurred in 1987 (a year Hankey, the Mark Lane devotee, could not even name at one point). At the time of writing this book, Lane believed Bush was somewhere around the scene and he believes Bush named the boats (as we have said, fine, he has every reason to think so). But that is about it. And the idea that Bush was a businessman asset used in the Bay of Pigs invasion is something that is defensible and logical. Like Prouty, Lane didn’t offer much more than that. They both had bigger fish to fry. But Hankey wrote this in his bizarre and needlessly convoluted argument on JFK Murder Solved. It concerns the much vaunted CIA memo (which is discussed in-depth in my actual review):

    Coogan pretends that I am alone in my position that this Bush-supervised group was directly involved. But that is precisely the principal thesis of Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial (the content of which is outrageously misrepresented by Coogan); and Gaeton Fonzi, cited by Coogan, has said that this is the most important area for further investigation into the murder.

    I don’t know if John ever read the same book everyone else did, but as I said earlier, George Bush is not mentioned in Lane’s book as part of the conspiracy. He never forges any relationships in Plausible Denial between Bush, Marita Lorenz, Gerry Hemmings, Hunt, and Frank Sturgis. He actually corrected himself because of Jim DiEugenio, who posted this reply about Hankey’s above spiel:

    This is pure balderdash. The Cubans Bush was allegedly associated with in the memo are never named in the memo. So what is the evidence that they are the same as those in Lorenz’s group? He produces none. And to conflate Fonzi with Lane on this issue is fundamentally dishonest. As Seamus pointed out, Fonzi in his fine book The Last Investigation, showed why Lorenz was not to be trusted on this point. He came to the conclusion she was trying to sell a screenplay. He explains why in detail on pages 83-107. Fonzi’s book came out in 1993, two years after Lane’s. Lane may have been unaware of this evidence against her. But Hankey should not have been. And used her tall tale anyway. After all, he needed some Cubans, any Cubans.

    25:03: Unintelligible Ramble

    Okay he’s getting into his famous memo here but he’s misappropriated something. In fact, he’s babbling on about an imminent invasion of Cuba and that somehow Hoover knew all about it and that Fabian Escalante was a Cuban Intelligence Officer, etc., etc. Oh boy, where does it end? I ask anyone: Does the Hoover document he’s discussing mention an invasion anywhere? (Click here to read it yourself.) It mentions the possibility of an “unauthorized raid” by some misguided anti-Castro Cubans. But next up and true to form, he’s discussing an imminent invasion of Cuba after the Kennedy assassination as discussed by Fabian Escalante – or did he? It’s all very unclear. Escalante and Cuban intelligence thought there was definitely the potential for it. The CIA had been pumping a story that Castro’s agents did it and that Oswald was an operative. But in an odd twist, Hankey, who had said earlier that the Mafia was not involved, yet mentions that Escalante has the invasion backed by “the Mob and United Fruit.”

    The invasion that Hankey discusses is not a central tenant of Escalante’s 2006 book, JFK: The Cuba Files, in any way, shape, or form. Escalante’s chief concern, indeed, the theme of his book, were the leads Cuban intelligence had developed in the case. The judgement by most researchers is that, though interesting in some regards, he was fairly off in terms of who organized it all. But Hankey picks up tidbits wherever he can.

    27:42: Jim Di-you-hay-neo

    John Hankey pronounces the surname of Jim DiEugenio (pronounced dee-you-jee-neo) in what seems like Spanish vowels. He obviously thinks Jim is Hispanic. The problem is, that with so many things, he is wrong. He overlooked that the DiEugenio surname is of Italian origin and is taken to mean “Son of Eugenio.”

    Nor can he even say the name of DiEugenio’s book correctly. It’s real title is The Assassinations. He calls it The Assassins. He gives no indications that this is his second book, his first being Destiny Betrayed. Judging by his mispronunciation of DiEugenio’s last name, Hankey also has no idea that Jim DiEugenio was a consultant to Stone on the DVD re-release of JFK and featured in a segment on new evidence declassified by the ARRB. Or that he has appeared as a guest in several documentaries on this case. Or that he has done literally scores of radio shows.

    28:00: DiEugenio, “The Operator,” and Mr. Bush Goes to Washington… Again

    At 28:00 minutes we are greeted with this slanderous tirade from Citizen Hankey about Jim DiEugenio:

    He’s a guy of great repute, and you hear intelligent people, who I believe are honest, and so on, referring to him with great deference, and… I think that he’s an operative. He’s certainly attacking the conclusions that I’ve drawn in a wildly unprofessional and unintelligent fashion. I mean, the guy has written extensively. He’s very, very well versed. He’s very knowledgeable, and nothing I’ve ever seen that he’s written has been incredibly stupid… [emphasis added]

    Now this is what we have come to expect from Hankey. Hankey say’s nothing negative about DiEugenio, except that he is “an operative.” In other words, that he is a CIA plant within the research community. And his evidence for this cheap smear? Well, it is that “he’s certainly attacking the conclusions that I’ve drawn in a wildly unprofessional and unintelligent fashion.” This is the sum of the evidence against DiEugenio. He disagreed with both the factual data in his film and the overall conclusion. Did Hankey ever read DiEugenio’s review of Ultimate Sacrifice? Say this for Lamar Waldron and Tom Hartmann: They never reduced themselves to slander to counteract a negative review. Further, is there anyone on the current scene who has accused the CIA more strongly and more often of being involved in the JFK murder than Jim DiEugenio? Finally, why is Hankey going after DiEugenio in the first place? He did not write that review of his film. I did.

    Within seconds, Hankey then confuses himself by saying that Hoover is supervising the Cubans. Luckily for Hankey, Corbett corrects him once again (not for the last time). Hankey gets back on track, but then he goes back to the idea of this memo advocating an invasion of Cuba (which it does not do). And then get this one. Really lean back and concentrate. For we are now in for another Hankeyan leap of logic. Even though the Hoover memo does not mention any kind of USA sponsored invasion, Hankey then says does notand that Hoover is writing the memo because Bush is the guy in charge of the possible invasion! It then gets worse: Hoover’s report constitutes a warning to Bush saying, in effect, “You’re busted,” and to shut it down. Why else, according to Hankey, would the FBI contact him? At this point it is a good idea to provide another link to the document. Please read it closely. Now compare what it says to what Hankey is aggrandizing it into for his own solipsistic purposes.

    Is there anything in the memo that mentions any kind of invasion? Or hints that it is CIA or state sponsored? What it actually says is that the FBI has heard that the State Department is worried that, in the wake of Kennedy’s murder, “some misguided anti-Castro group… might undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba… .” In fact, the memo goes on to say that the FBI sources in Miami say they “knew of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.” So what is Hankey talking about? This seems to be nothing but pure and irresponsible hyperbole.

    Hankey clearly doesn’t understand how intelligence works. For if the memo really said what he is inflating it to say, some FBI heavy-hitter like William Sullivan or Cartha DeLoach would be sent out to talk with some CIA representative, say someone like Richard Helms or Tracy Barnes or Desmond Fitzgerald (all of them way above and beyond George Bush). And this discussion would be off the record. It would not be written up at all. As Warren DeBrueys told Jim DiEugenio in his home in Metarie, whenever the FBI stumbled across a CIA operation, they did not interfere with it. If the situation was volatile enough, the report from such a meeting would likely wind up in Hoover’s personal files and not routed through the system, as this was. Larry Hancock explained as much in my review. If Bush is so important and if this was word of an “invasion,” then why did it get written up in the first place?

    Hankey then makes another enormous leap and mentions the utterly fictional meeting between Hoover and Bush at the FBI. This is precisely the angle he got attacked on by myself and which he erased out of Dark Legacy (before our first review appeared). But he brings it back up again. This encounter never ever happened. With regards to this, in his outing on JFK Murder Solved, he accused me of illicitly procuring a copy of JFK II, in which the demonstrably fraudulent meeting between Bush and Hoover is depicted. The joke here is that Hankey has numerous versions depicting this ridiculous scene all over the internet, and has done so for a rather long time.

    31:28: Mallon and Bush Send for Dulles

    What is it with official documents that John Hankey doesn’t get? Because the lies and distortions of the historical record just keep on a rolling in. In JFK II and Dark Legacy, Hankey unearths a letter from Neil Mallon to Allen Dulles. In the draft version of my review I had paid some attention to this. As I said earlier, it was one of the things that didn’t make it in. In the Mallon memo, which is by itself an interesting little document (if one can squint they can see it), Mallon is thankful that a friend, “Tiny,” (it’s what it looks like to me), has “convinced” Dulles to come to the Carlton (presumably the Ritz Carlton in Georgetown, Washington) at 7:00 pm to celebrate the Anniversary. (Not sure precisely what they were celebrating, but Hankey, in his zeal to prove a point, doesn’t recognize that the date appears to be mid-April, near enough to the date of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Needless to say, I regret bringing this up because Hankey will now change his tack and make numerous other claims.) This location was chosen by Mallon (who is going to stay at the DuPont Plaza) because it was the most convenient place for Dulles to go to. He also says he has someone else is coming, whose name is indiscernible, and he has also invited Prescott Bush. Mallon wants Dulles to “listen in” on their “Pilot Project in the Carribean.”

    Hankey describes this memo as Bush and Mallon “sending” for Dulles, as if he is a notch above the hotel concierge in status. In JFK II, moments before we view the Mellon/Dresser Industries document, Hankey had shown a memo in which Bush had sent a letter to C. D. Jackson recommending his pal Mallon for a position, and he mentions that he had been recruiting people for Allen Dulles and the CIA. Allen Dulles is regarded as the father of the agency by any and all researchers (bar John Hankey). Thus most reasonable people would assume that Mallon was, for all intents and purposes, Dulles’ follower.

    Most people would also clearly see that Mallon had pestered Dulles to come along. Of all the people attending, the location was named as being the most convenient for Dulles. As for Bush sending for Dulles, this is ludicrous. He’s been invited and seems to have had no problem wanting to be in Dulles’ presence. There’s nothing indicating Bush sent for him or demanded his presence in any way. If he had planned it with Mallon, which is a distinct possibility, they focused all attention on Dulles. Dulles was the man they needed, not the other way around. It’s as clear as daylight. Another thing that is pretty clear is the date of the document, which Hankey ignores while claiming to Corbett that the Pilot Project in the Carribean is “George Bush and the Bay of Pigs.” The problem here is that the document looks like it is dated in April of 1963. The Bay of Pigs occurred in 1961 – two years earlier.

    36:40: Prouty Picked up a Newspaper in Australia

    Part way through this ramble, Hankey says Fletcher Prouty was involved in NSAM 273, the order to withdraw 1000 troops from Vietnam by Christmas 1963. In fact, it was NSAM 263 which contained this order – and all troops by the end of 1965. NSAM 273 was the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s reversal of NSAM 263, which ultimately resulted in the deployment of 185,000 troops into Vietnam by the end of 1965.

    Now Prouty figures fairly prominently in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Who can forget the scene where Mr. X encounters Jim Garrison in Washington and tells him about picking up a newspaper and instantly thinking there was a cover story put out about Oswald? As it turns out, Hankey can. He forgot what country Fletcher Prouty was in, and the famous name of the newspaper he picked up. Corbett had to correct him again. Prouty was not in Hankey’s Australia, but in New Zealand and the paper was the Christchurch Star. But Hankey isn’t done. He then calls Prouty a CIA operative. This is JFK 101 level stuff and Hankey is flunking. In the film, Mr. X explicitly denies this. Everybody knows that Colonel Prouty was a high-level liaison between the Pentagon and the CIA. If Hankey were as big an advocate of Prouty as he says he is, he would know that Prouty never worked for the Agency.

    John, let’s stop here and take a quick breather. Are these horrific mistakes irrelevancies to you? Are these minor matters, or mistakes that do not interfere with your overall analysis that the Bush family orchestrated the assassination? If so John, let’s take you – no, let’s walk you – back to the start. The irrelevancies we discuss are the irrelevancies you bring up. Not us. Understand this. We simply clean up your errors – big and small. What has Fletcher Prouty in New Zealand got to do with anything regarding your grand scheme? Did George Bush send him there John? Well you seem to think so. Why on earth would you say stuff along the lines of: “It’s clear they moved Prouty out of the country to move Bush into Dallas to supervise his troops.” And later on when discussing Bush’s phone call to the FBI in Tyler, Texas, why would you joke that he should have placed the call from New Zealand?

    Fletcher Prouty never actually said New Zealand got the story ahead of the rest of the planet. After spending five years examining the Star (unlike your 5 minutes), I agree with Prouty that there was a probable cover story. This went out around the world. None of the potential conduits of this information have any bearing on the Bush family. It has more to do with individuals like Joe Goulden, Hal Hendrix, and David Atlee Phillips. Persons you think are not relevant. While you are at it, please tell us that Prescott Bush invented Operation Mockingbird, which was a major part of the plot that day.

    39:10: George Bush’s Impossible Phone Call in Tyler, Texas

    Hankey’s mysterious conflict with documentation again rears its ugly head. But before we tap this rich vein of Hankeyism, let us note that he says that Bush cannot remember where he was that day. This is a myth. Paul Kangas is the spiritual father to Hankey, which, considering his grip on facts, makes perfect sense. He seems to have come up with the idea of “Bush, The Amnesiac.” In this excerpt from a draft for another project, Kangas provided no sources for the following 1991 diatribe in his piece The Kennedy Assassination: The Nixon Bush Connection:

    On the day of the assassination Bush was in Texas, but he denies knowing exactly where he was. Since he had been the supervisor for the secret Cuban teams, headed by former Cuban police commander Felix Rodriguez, since 1960, it is likely Bush was also in Dallas in 1963. Several of the Cubans he was supervising as dirty-tricks teams for Nixon, were photographed in the Zagruder film.

    Only Hankey could be influenced by someone who calls the most famous home movie ever, the “Zagruder film,” and then calls George’s dad “Preston.” And to make it a trifecta, Kangas says “Preston” (he, of course, should have said “Prescott”) ran his son’s non-existent campaign for the Senate in 1962. That Hankey and Russ Baker have both fallen for this line says much about their “rigorous research standards.” (And yes, Jesse Ventura was criticized by me as well for this.) Hankey then tries to say here that Bush was not really in Tyler, Texas at the time! How? He says there was only seven minutes for him to make a call to the FBI about Thomas Parrot. As if seven minutes were not enough time to call the FBI. Yet, the FBI document says that Bush called at 1:45. George Bush actually had something like 15 minutes to make the phone call. It is there in black and white in the document he so astoundingly says gave Bush 7 minutes to make the call. Hankey’s excuse – and he always has one – will be something like the call would have taken time to get through and so on. I’m sorry, but it’s all there and it looks like an extremely simple operation to any rational person looking at the document in question. (Click here for a view.)

    56:07: Madeleine Brown, The Prostitute

    Hankey’s right to be skeptical of Madeleine Brown. However, he’s not prepared to go all the way. He seems to believe that the mystical Murchison assassination-eve party occurred. It’s not clear to me if he does or not. But he goes all the way and smears the dead woman by calling her a prostitute. I have seen no evidence which suggests she was a prostitute. Yet based on the fact that she attended some upper-echelon Dallas parties, the woman is called a prostitute: “Why do you think they keep inviting her?” Hankey asks. In the midst of Brown’s purported whoring, Hankey, in his excitement, forgets the name of the prominent Wall Street figure on the Warren Commission who was supposed to be there also. John J. McCloy was the name you were after John. Gad, you “expert” you.

    1:13:41: Hankey, The Eternal Victim

    James Corbett clearly wanted Hankey on his show to discuss Dark Legacy. But what it turned into was a rambling diatribe against CTKA. The debate on Murder Solved is an interesting case in point. In the final stages of his interview, Corbett asks Hankey if he has formulated a response to “Delhayneos” CTKA “hit piece” on him. (Even though I – not Jim – wrote it.) Hankey’s reply, as per usual, was all over the place and yet deeply revealing:

    Hankey: The way I’ve been dealing with it is to address it where it’s raised and to ignore it when it’s…. and I haven’t raised it on my website because I don’t think that 99 percent of the population are familiar….and, and god, I mean have you read it?

    Corbett: Yes, I actually have.

    Hankey: Yes…..well congrats … you know, what is it 25 pages?

    Corbett: Yeah, it’s quite voluminous.

    Hankey: And it’s horrible I think….um and I find it impenetrable, [Yes, after myriad silly and petty assaults at it, he’s finally figured it out] and it’s…anyway, anyway you can find my rebuttals at JFK Murder Solved, because they raised it ah at JFK Murder Solved and so I asked DiYouhayneo…..will you know allow me to respond? And he said nooo ha ha ha, okay alright… so now what?

    Now, let us do our usual Hankeyan breakdown. First of all, Hankey has raised the issue on his web site. We have seen it. But what he does is quite slick. In order to preserve his fig leaf that he really didn’t make that many errors in the film, he eliminates any reference to Jim’s second post there. Why? Because Jim listed the 20 errors he made in the first half of the film. Secondly, as Jim later explained when he was allowed to reply on Corbett’s show, CTKA has a general rule that we don’t allow authors to counter the reviews we place, for the simple reason that we negatively review so many books, essays, and DVD’s that it would take up much too much time. (There has only been one exception to this rule, a reply to my discussion of Alex Jones.)

    But let’s continue Hankey’s “comeback special” tirade, where he is a bit more candid:

    Um and… anyway to me it’s such a stupid ugly, ah, rabbit hole that I don’t bring it up at my place. I do have a link I can send you if you like where I have Coogan’s statement, my response, DiYouhayneo’s response and my response they’re all at JFK Murder Solved. Um I have them on a hidden page at my website but I don’t put them out front. Because I don’t think that’s really that much of a problem…

    Yes, John. That’s why you’re saying you’re hiding it when it’s a public forum. That totally makes sense. But in the next sentence you completely give the game away:

    Right I mean I didn’t make my movie for those people…those the………what percent of the population I dunno the small percent of the population that um read 25 page…..25 page hit pieces on a little known documentary about Bush’s involvement.

    As we have explained, my piece was not a “hit piece.” It was a painstaking correction of a litany of literally scores of errors. If Hankey would have done his homework, he would not have been embarrassed, as he himself admitted at JFK Murder Solved. Incredibly, he never even turned the film over to a fact-checker who was more well-versed in the JFK case than he was – which is just irresponsible.

    Hankey’s JFK II is not a little video by any account. In fact, by all accounts it has gone viral and brought Hankey quite a lot of attention. Thus, when Hankey plays victim, he’s either deluded or making a fantastic marketing pitch.

    1:16:15: J in Latin is I-I

    He then uses an example of CTKA’s correcting his use of the boat named Barbara in the Bay of Pigs. The boat we explained was the Barbara J, not simply, the Barbara. Now Hankey ignored the middle initial because it damaged his point. (Which he’ll blame now on Prouty and then us for going against Prouty-foul betrayers; we are as you will see in the grand finale). Barbara Bush was George Bush’s wife, but Barbara has no middle name. So perhaps he was wrong to insinuate the ship was named after her? He now tries to reclaim ground by making the bizarre claim that the “J in Latin is I-I.”

    Hankey’s excuse for all of this:

    Now Bush being the classest classicist, a classic devil worshipper if, you’ll, you’ll allow me to go there, you know what I am saying these guys are into that sort of …….his, his Skull and Bones name I believe is “Beelzebub” but they’re into that weird crap. So it’s legitimate to suggest that it is called the Barbara II. Because ‘J’ in Latin is double ‘I’. I’m not going into all that.

    Now, Hankey spent a good deal of time in his film discussing Bush’s association with Skull and Bones. In the CTKA review, he was roundly shredded because of his inaccuracies. Hankey, “the S&B expert,” should have known that Bush’s name was “Magog.” As for the conversion of ‘J’ into Roman numerals, it is a half truth. Is he really trying somehow to equate Roman numerals with the letter value of ‘J’ ? If he took a quick look on Google, it would have shown him that there was little numerical usage in replacing ‘J’ with an ‘I’ or ‘i’, and it definitely didn’t equal two of them.

    In any case, Prouty said it… “first-hand knowledge, in this codified fashion.”

    Hankey reaches a new all-time low with regard to misappropriating Fletcher Prouty – who never ever said anything of the “codified” sort in his discussions about the Bay of Pigs.

    In a field abounding with some truly bad research and researchers, John Hankey scoops the pool. To even call Hankey a researcher is to shame what the term means. Real researchers, when they are criticized, do not have to hide behind the skirts of their elders and betters, and then scream they are being singled out and victimized. They defend their work on its own terms.

    Hankey cannot. So he hides.


    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    DiEugenio’s Review Update of “Dark Legacy”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum


    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4

  • A Letter to James Corbett


    Dear James Corbett:

    This letter is in regard to your interview with John Hankey which was broadcast on December 4, 2010.

    I am a student of the JFK assassination and an interested and impartial observer.

    I just finished re-listening to the interview this morning when it became obvious that the end portion of the interview has since been edited out. Removed.

    It cuts out just as you can be heard redirecting Mr. Hankey to “the CTKA hit piece” put out by Jim DiEugenio.

    Fortunately, I held on to the original-length version!

    I don’t know which was more hilarious – Hankey saying that by 1972 he had “made himself an expert” in the JFK case, or the part where Hankey says that he “dropped out of college to get an education.” I’m going to have to remember that one in case I’m ever asked to deliver a speech to aspiring students – it’ll undoubtedly save them large on pesky tuition fees.

    Hankey’s harangue of Jim DiEugenio kicks in around the 27 minute mark. By the way, it’s pronounced “Dee U Geenio”… not “Dee U Haynio.” The name is Italian, not Spanish. How do I know this? Well, it’s because I’m familiar with the work of both DiEugenio and Hankey.

    Here is the fair and balanced way in which Hankey introduces DiEugenio:

    He’s a guy of great repute, and you hear intelligent people, who I believe are honest, and so on, referring to him with great deference, and…I think that he’s an operative. He’s certainly attacking the conclusions that I’ve drawn in a wildly unprofessional and unintelligent fashion. I mean, the guy has written extensively. He’s very, very well-versed. He’s very knowledgeable, and nothing I’ve ever seen that he’s written has been incredibly stupid…

    An operative? Wildly unprofessional? Unintelligent? Are we talking about the same Jim DiEugenio here?

    Since Hankey brought it up, kindly allow me to point out the many times Hankey strayed during this interview. Talk about being unprofessional? Wrong names. Wrong dates. Wrong numbers. Wrong memos. Wrong automobiles. And personal smears galore.

    By the way, throughout most of the interview I couldn’t help but notice the sound of a baby crying. Who was that – Hankey’s fact checker?

    Errors made by Hankey:

    • Jim DiEugenio’s book is called The Assassinations, not The Assassins.
    • Hankey mistakenly says that Hoover supervised the Cubans. Host Corbett had to correct him that he (Hankey) actually meant George H.W. Bush – not Hoover.
    • When Hankey talks about Fletcher Prouty reading the famous newspaper article in Australia, Host Corbett points out that the article in question appeared in the Christchurch Star in New Zealand – not Australia. To which Hankey reacts: “Um, OK, very good. Thank you very much. I’m sure that you’re correct.” [LOL!]
    • Hankey then says that Prouty wrote NSAM 273 (which Hankey refers to as “273”), which Hankey says outlined Kennedy’s intentions of withdrawing 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by Christmas. In fact, it was NSAM 263 which detailed Kennedy’s intentions of withdrawing 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by Christmas 1963 – and all troops by the end of 1965. NSAM 273 was a REVERSAL of NSAM 263, which ultimately resulted in the deployment of 185,000 troops into Vietnam by the end of 1965.
    • Hankey says that Oswald was seen leaving the TSBD in a green Studebaker by Roger Craig. In reality, the car was a light green Rambler.
    • On the topic of the E. Howard Hunt “deathbed” confession, he says that Hunt points the finger at, “…a guy named McCord? No, that’s Cord.” (Hunt was clearly referring to Cord Meyer.) When Host Corbett asks Hankey if he means “Frank McCord,” Hankey then says: “No…um…if you’re very, very familiar – since you asked the question, I’d be counting on you to be very familiar with the Hunt confession…” [LOL! Um, exactly who is the host here and who is the expert? It seems that in this interview the roles are reversed.]
    • During his next exchange, Hankey rambles on (I’m not sure if it was a ramble…could have been a Studebaker, I suppose) about some Republican woman (whom Hankey gladly volunteers was “a little bit drunk”), and the CFR, when he says after a long silence: “Um…I forget what question I’m answering.” Host Corbett then reminds Hankey that they were still on the topic of the Hunt confession. “Right!” exclaims Hankey – the sound of the penny finally dropping must have been loud enough to be heard clear across the next county over.
    • Hankey then quickly switches the topic to Madeleine Brown. In attempting to describe her to the host, he says, “…I wanted to call her a prostitute…she’s on the History Channel…” When Host Corbett points out that Madeleine was LBJ’s mistress, Hankey says, “so-called, yes…I don’t mean to say that she’s a liar, um, but if you listen to her story, she talks about how she got invited to all these Texas millionaires’ parties. Well, you know, why do you think they keep inviting her? (Chuckles.) Because she’s such a brilliant conversationalist?”
    • Still on the topic of Madeleine, he says: “She says she’s there with Johnson, and that Johnson comes walking out of a meeting with these guys, and… I can never remember this… the name of this individual… but she comes… she comes walking out of a meeting… at least one of whom is CFR. He’s the CFR guy who was on the Warren Commission. He’s a Rockefeller thug who was on the Warren Commission. Um, and I can nev–… I… you know, I’ve looked his name up twenty times but I can never make it stick to the tip of my tongue. Anyhow!” [LOL!]
    • Towards the end of the interview, Hankey talks about a supposed death photo of author Gary Webb. Hankey goes on to say how he showed the photo to a “bed buddy” of Webb’s, someone who was, in Hankey’s opinion, “way too close” of a friend.

    And there you have it, Mr. Corbett.

    Not only is John Hankey notorious for getting his facts wrong, and being completely unprepared (not to mention misinformed), but he also seems to take great pleasure in smearing everybody he mentions along the way.

    Perhaps you’ll keep this in mind the next time you consider asking him to appear on your show.

    Sincerely,

    Frank Cassano

  • John Hankey, Dark Legacy, aka JFK2 – JFK 2 Updated


    As Seamus Coogan noted in his deconstruction of John Hankey’s deleterious and delirious quasi-documentary JFK 2, Hankey has since gotten some advice and pro bono work from Hollywood. This resulted in a more professional version of the film. The title of the redo is Dark Legacy.

    This time around, at least the presentation is smoother and slicker. Some of the music has been improved. There are more modern graphics and effects, like fades and dissolves. The overall effect is to make the film easier on the eyes. And a little easier on the ear. (At times, Hankey still puts in his old acoustical folk song.)

    And someone prevailed upon Hankey to remove three of the worst howlers in the film. First, the immortally camp scenario of George Bush going into J. Edgar Hoover’s office with two Cuban thugs and threatening him with a flechette gun is gone. Second, the phony dialogue put in the mouth of Bill Colby about knowing George Bush and Howard Hunt were involved in the assassination in Dallas is also gone. Another egregious error about Kennedy letting the Russians search for Cuban training camps in the USA after the Missile Crisis is removed.

    Hankey has also added a new opening that focuses on the attributes of Kennedy’s presidency. He notes here the Steel Crisis, his civil rights program, his disarmament pledge, among others.

    But, still, even after the technical improvements and the surgery on some of the worst segments of the first version(s), it’s surprising how many errors were left intact. In other words, after all those years it was out, Seamus Coogan was the only person who took the time and effort to go after the film with a fine toothcomb. Which, of course, speaks well for CTKA, and poorly for the rest of the research community. Are we the only people doing fact checking? It appears that way. Which, of course, doesn’t say much for the so-called JFK research community.

    One would think the man would look up the proper spellings of names if one was going to depict those names on the screen. Hankey doesn’t, therefore names like Robert Blakey, and George Burkley and Aubrey Rike are spelled wrong. One would also think that the cutting of the film would match up correctly. Well, the two HSCA acoustic experts, Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy never testified before the Church Committee. And related to this, he depicts Dallas DA Henry Wade as Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr.

    Hankey still includes the whole incredible 13 shot fusillade scenario. Unlike what Hankey intones as narrator, Richard Helms never testified at the trial of Howard Hunt and he never admitted that Marita Lorentz was a spy. (See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, pgs. 214-225)

    With his usual penchant for overstatement, Hankey says that the above trial depicted in the Lane book showed that Hunt was guilty of killing president Kennedy. As Coogan showed, it did not. And Richard Nixon never said to Bob Haldeman that the whole “Bay of Pigs thing” message he sent to Helms meant the Kennedy assassination. This was a deduction later made by Haldeman. Guy Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts never testified to the Warren Commission. And she never told anyone she saw Oswald at the training camp at Lake Pontchartrain. Strangely, Hankey adds in this version that parking lot manager Adrian Alba was Oswald’s closest associate in New Orleans. Yet, reportedly, all he did was read some magazines in his office.

    I could go on and on. But the point is that although three of the worst faux pas are gone, the great majority of the errors Coogan enumerated are still there. And let me add that concerning his case against George Bush, Hankey now adds the Parrott memorandum. I discussed this at length in my Russ Baker review. Bush at first denied and then could not recall his call about James Parrott to the FBI. My question: If you were an ambitious and successful Texas politician, would you want to admit you had some rightwing nut in your campaign headquarters a few months before JFK was killed? And that this man had threatened Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs? And unlike what Hankey insinuates, Bush was not in Dallas at the time of the shooting; he was in Tyler, Texas campaigning in front of a Kiwanis Club gathering.

    All in all, although the new version is a slight improvement, this is still an inferior film that does not do our cause any good.


    “The Dark Legacy of John Hankey”

    Hankey/DiEugenio Debate Murder Solved

    “Onwards and Downwards with John Hankey”

    Coogan Reply to Fetzer at Deep Politics Forum


    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 1

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 2

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 3

    Master Class with John Hankey, Part 4