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H.P. Albarelli has passed away.
#52
I have been struggling with this for a few days now, unsure of what to say or how best to honor the memory of one who has fallen. I have written too many of these in the past few years. I don't want to write any more. But, as they say, life is what happens when you've made other plans. Life, and the leaving of it.

Hank Albarelli had worked in the Carter White House and for the US Treasury Department. He traveled the world, and we had been to a lot of the same places in our time which made him a congenial personality. I had been interviewing a famous "wandering bishop" in Indian Lakes a man who had worked with JFK assassination suspect Jack Martin back in the day and made a side trip to see Hank. I visited him at his home on Florida's Gulf Coast: a fabulous place with some beautiful artifacts he had collected on his travels. We spoke of Watergate and Nixon, as well as Frank Olson: the subject of his monumental work, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments (2009). I say "monumental" for several reasons. In the first place, it is a masterful work that ties together many of the loose threads in the Frank Olson story, threads you might never have known existed were it not for Hank's remarkable ability to do deep research and get inside of a story to the extent that he lived it for years. In the second place, the physical book is itself monumental in size, coming in at over 800 pages. I was honored to write the Introduction, which sadly comes nowhere close to preparing the reader for the exhilarating voyage down a series of rabbit holes in an American history we never knew, or blissfully had forgotten: rabbit holes that converge in a deep, dark cavern below the circus of political discourse and lethal conspiracies. That's the cavern where you will discover what really happened to an American scientist who had been dosed with LSD in 1953 and then was murdered, defenestrated from a Manhattan hotel room. Sounds simple, straightforward, but it isn't.

The energy and intelligence Hank brought to that story his doggedness in getting files, in getting people to talk, and his sharp eye for the telling detail, the odd piece of evidence that everyone else ignores is intimidating. He was a bear of good humor and love of life. A few years after we met, he wrote to tell me he had bought a building in New England that had once been a Masonic temple. He found a cache of old books, documents and ledgers there and wanted to know what they were. I was amused to think that Hank of all people would be the one to fall into a situation like that.

Any time he showed up in my Facebook feed it was always just pictures of his family, of whom he was obviously and especially proud. No snarky trolls of other researchers; no ad hominem attacks; none of what we have come to expect from social media communication. That said, he didn't suffer fools gladly; when someone put forward a contentious or controversial claim, he would ask for the source. "Where are the documents? Where is the proof? How do you know?"

Hank was not a "search engine researcher", of which there are far too many these days: people who claim they are investigative journalists because they looked something up online. He was a real investigator who went where the story was. Who talked to people. Who went after the files. Who did the hard work. Who put the pieces together.

He suffered a massive stroke on May 20, and another lethal one 10 days later. He left us. He had just finished a book about the Kennedy assassination. "Another book on the assassination?" I can hear you say. If it's Hank's work then it isn't just another book; it isn't a rehash of old research or the theft of ideas from other writers. He had something to say. He had a point of view, a sharp perspective and a keen sense of smell that was honed by decades of dealing with liars, prevaricators, conmen, spies, politicos, and bureaucrats. The book Coup in Dallas: Who Killed Kennedy and Why is listed on amazon for pre-order now. It will deal, among other things, with some of the lesser known but equally important figures around the assassination, including former Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny (on whom I devote a lot of space in my own work, so I am eager to learn what Hank has uncovered). It bears a foreword by Dick Russell, another friend (famous in the JFK assassination community for his riveting The Man Who Knew Too Much and who also kindly wrote a foreword to volume two of my own Sinister Forces).

Coup in Dallas will be a fitting testament to the astonishing career of a real researcher who loved the truth and hated the stench of lies. We use words like "indefatigable" and "relentless" and "dedicated" when we speak of people like Hank, but Leslie Sharp a friend, colleague and co-author of of Hank's who informed me of his passing said it best: "He died a warrior."

God speed, Hank.
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I

"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
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Messages In This Thread
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 19-06-2019, 10:56 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 20-06-2019, 04:17 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 21-06-2019, 10:17 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 21-06-2019, 02:22 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 21-06-2019, 02:45 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 21-06-2019, 05:23 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 21-06-2019, 06:09 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 21-06-2019, 06:38 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 21-06-2019, 06:43 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 22-06-2019, 04:58 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 22-06-2019, 07:06 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 22-06-2019, 07:57 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 23-06-2019, 03:59 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 23-06-2019, 04:06 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 23-06-2019, 10:07 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 24-06-2019, 05:05 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 24-06-2019, 05:11 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 24-06-2019, 06:09 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 24-06-2019, 06:17 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 25-06-2019, 07:26 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 25-06-2019, 02:39 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 25-06-2019, 07:11 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 25-06-2019, 07:15 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 25-06-2019, 09:57 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 26-06-2019, 06:34 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 26-06-2019, 10:50 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 26-06-2019, 11:55 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 28-06-2019, 06:14 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 29-06-2019, 04:02 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 29-06-2019, 04:09 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 29-06-2019, 04:56 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 29-06-2019, 06:04 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 29-06-2019, 06:42 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 29-06-2019, 09:37 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Lauren Johnson - 30-06-2019, 03:16 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 30-06-2019, 04:08 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 30-06-2019, 07:12 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Peter Lemkin - 30-06-2019, 08:18 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 04-07-2019, 09:22 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 04-07-2019, 06:14 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 05-09-2019, 08:30 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 06-09-2019, 11:45 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 07-09-2019, 04:12 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 09-09-2019, 01:24 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 03-10-2019, 10:07 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 04-10-2019, 02:16 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 05-10-2019, 08:31 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 09-10-2019, 03:54 AM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by Magda Hassan - 14-10-2019, 01:48 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 29-12-2019, 06:56 PM
H.P. Albarelli has passed away. - by James Lateer - 10-01-2020, 06:47 PM

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