One of the things that continues to amaze me is the potential for new research to be driven by what would appear to be small pieces of information. In one sense its encouraging because it shows that decades of pure ‘grunt work’ have given us a knowledge base allowing us grasp the broader implications of such details – but its also frustrating to realize what early official investigations could have done with the information now accessible to us.

And I can say from my own experience that such details cause me to reconsider things that I really had not thought deeply enough about previously – especially given what we have learned about standard practices of both the FBI and CIA circa 1963. I’ll be discussing a few of those things with Chuck Ochelli on his show this evening, including the implications of the extensive (one way) communication going from the FBI to the CIA about Lee Harvey Oswald and his activities following his return to the United States.

A new look at the FBI information flow, combined with what we now know was indeed going from the DRE to the CIA, at least to the CIA Special Affairs (Cuba project) staff we get an entirely new picture of how much “on the radar” Lee Harvey Oswald truly was by September 1963. Combining that with the ability to actually trace routing notations on documents (my friend David’s specialty) we get a new feel for just how many CIA officers were aware of Oswald and chose to hold back that information after the assassination.

We also get a new sense of the exact individuals involved with that information – which reached not only from the Cuba Project officers across the lines at JMWAVE to specific paramilitary officers who not only had been involved with DRE military operations but who were still using DRE personnel in the CIA’s own covert maritime operations in the summer and fall of 1963. We have been speculating about such connections for decades, now we can actually trace them based on documents and projects.

Even small details can open the door to questioning the areas where we should have been looking. As an example we have a host of documents on all the newest operations/paramilitary projects going on at Miami Station – but we have virtually no documents on the station’s propaganda activities (representing half their budget). Including a new black propaganda operation targeting the FPCC, which is exactly where information about Oswald’s summer FPCC activities with the FPCC would have been most significant.

And on a completely separate note, the evolving story of ZRRIFLE/MI (Miami Base) being operational up to the time of the assassination raises another question worthy of exploration i.e. who even knew about that operation in 1963? We know Bissell had started the Exec Action Program with Harvey and Helms had continued it, allowing Harvey to use it against Castro. But at the same time the SAS chief, Desmond Fitzgerald, was devoting his staff to a new and extremely secret campaign to using Rolando Cubela to assassinate Castro.

Those two efforts seem to have been totally uncoordinated, the best we can say is that JFK knew nothing about either, but we cannot confirm that anyone other than Helms knew about both or that there was any operational oversight at all over the ZRRIFLE actions, which were embedded and compartmentalized within the support staff at JMWAVE.

In short, the devil is in the details, and in this case he may be forcing us outside the neat box we have built for ourselves, certainly he is pushing me out of mine.