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- [00:02]
Commercial Narrator
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first, there the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [00:30]
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- [01:03]
Don Wildman
This episode is brought to you by perc. The intelligent platform for travel and spend. Made to free up time and cut down costs, Perk removes the time sucking friction filled tasks that slow teams down and burn them out so you can focus on the work you were actually hired to do. The projects and decisions that move a business forward, not the endless admin of booking trips, chasing receipts or wrangling travel policies. As someone constantly spinning a bunch of plates on my job, PERC helps me gain back all important time to work on what really matters. Researching American history for you, our listeners. With perc, you can forget about spending time digging up that hotel dinner receipt from last quarter or trying to book a work trip across 100 open tabs. Perc has you covered. No more tedious tasks that eat away your day. Perk Powering real work. Discover perc@perk.com AmericanHistoryHit We've been working on a puzzle. Hours of precious, painstaking work. Lining up the straight edges, finding the corners, gathering the colors. And there's all those impossible sky pieces in the ground. Well, at least the grass and the wall, the curbs. It's a street running through a city plaza. And oh, here's the car. Yeah, the limousine. Then another. It looks like a motorcade. You know the feeling, that satisfying click when a piece you've been looking for snaps in, fitting together? Only if you're honest, that one doesn't fit so neatly. Try another angle maybe. Nah. And the one on the wall is forced too. Then all those missing pieces. Will this ever be done? Try as we might to get the full picture, the truth of the thing. It's never as easy as that. Hi everybody, I'm Don Wildman and you're listening to American History. Hit it is one of the perennial mysteries of the 20th century. Maybe perpetual is the better word, considering it remains mysterious even now on the 21st, did Lee Harvey Oswald, beleaguered husband, misfit, ex Marine, self styled revolutionary, really act alone in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when he fired his rifle at President John F. Kennedy? Or was he part of a larger plot and therefore a pawn, a patsy caught up in forces beyond his control? Was Oswald the lone gunman who assassinated the president? Or did he take the fall in a deeper, even darker conspiracy? These are questions that endure, fueled, of course, by what happened two days later when Oswald himself was shot by Jack Ruby as he was moved out of the Dallas City Jail. In the days that followed, the Warren Commission was formed to investigate and then report their findings in hopes that those questions and more would be settled once and for all and the nation could move on. Well, that report was delivered, and move on we did. But more than 60 years later, it was without the desired resolution. We remain today a country full of doubt and suspicions about the Kennedy assassination, not to mention others. Jefferson Morley is a journalist previously associated with the Washington Post, now digging into events surrounding the Kennedy assassination, and he does so on his JFK Facts substack and podcast going on now three years. We are speaking to him today to find out why there are still so many questions surrounding the JFK assassination. Quick disclaimer. After 60 years, it is possible we will never find the answers, and we certainly won't be giving them in this podcast. But with new files being released, there is a lot to talk about. Jeff, it's nice to see you.
- [05:01]
Jefferson Morley
Nice to see you, Don.
- [05:02]
Don Wildman
We're going to do an overview. This is a conversation, I guess, fitting for the time of year that it is. It being November every year, we kind of face the fact that this happened and we're still not completely settled about it. So I think this is a useful conversation. I hope so. An overview walkthrough of what the Waring Commission claimed happened in those days. And move nimbly through this timeline. And I'm hoping you'll stop and add your own insights as we go.
- [05:28]
Jefferson Morley
Let's do that, because there's also a lot of new information that has come into the record in the past two years. So we want to set the context for what we knew before and what we know now.
- [05:40]
Don Wildman
Exactly. So let's start with the very basics. What is the theory of the lone gunman? As confirmed by the Warren Commission and FBI?
- [05:47]
Jefferson Morley
The story of a lone gunman was first come up with by President Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover two days after President Kennedy was killed. And both men decided on November 25 that the government had to come to the conclusion that Oswald alone had committed the crime. The FBI ratified that in its report A couple of weeks later, J. Edgar Hoover was not widely trusted at all. And President Johnson knew that he needed another finding. And so he created the Warren Commission, which nine months later came back and never really investigated any other possibility. Basically prosecuted a case against Oswald and announced that he alone had committed the crime and that there was no political motivation for the crime. The Warren Commission, unfortunately, never established a motive for why Oswald would have done this. So the Warren Commission's conclusion didn't make a lot of sense on its face. And in the years that followed as people began to go through the evidence that was arraigned to support the long gunman conclusion they found that it didn't make a lot of sense forensically. There was not evidence to connect Oswald to the gun. The chain of possession of the gun, the bullets, was all open to question. And so, you know, doubts arose right away that the Warren Commission's very hasty and superficial conclusion, you know, had reached the right understanding of what had actually happened to President Kennedy.
- [07:24]
Don Wildman
I did a special in Dallas and this involved a couple of experiences that were really notable for me. One being sitting in the Dallas, I guess, county library there or municipal library. They rolled out the Warren Report to me on this bookshelf of a cart and there were, like, 27 volumes of books that were the Warren Commission Report. It was a massive amount of pages. I don't know if it.
- [07:46]
Jefferson Morley
Yeah, the Commission's report was about 800, 900 pages. That was a narrative of the crime and the allegations against Oswald. After that report was released, the Commission released all of the FBI statements, the witness statements, the doctor's statements. So Those were the 26 volumes of evidence that were put out. And what happened was people began. After they'd read the report, they went in and started reading the 26 volumes and trying to understand how the Commission had come to the conclusion that it had. And that's when the doubts arose because the evidence that Oswald acted alone was not very strong. And the Commission tried to build up that case in a way. But when you looked at the evidence, the case was not strong. And people began to say that, wow.
- [08:34]
Don Wildman
I think I missed that completely in our. In our telling of the story. Basically, you're saying they had a mission to prove what had already been stated by the President.
- [08:43]
Jefferson Morley
And, yes, we have the phone conversations of LBJ and Hoover on November 25th within hours of Oswald's murder. And both men say, we have to convince the public that he acted alone. The investigation had not even begun or had barely begun. And the two top people in The US Government had already decided on what the conclusion should be. And so they did get the conclusion that they wanted from the Warren Commission. But the Warren Commission's case was not strong. And as we've had more and more evidence come out over the years and especially in the last couple of years, the Warren Commission's conclusions just are not supported by the evidence that we have now.
- [09:24]
Don Wildman
Lee Harry Oswald was up there in that book depository. They find the gun that he did order from a catalog. The bullet fragments and shell casings match that rifle. All that was substantiated by the fact also that he ends up getting caught hours later after having killed a police officer. I mean, there's really persuasive evidence about this guy acting like a guilty man.
- [09:48]
Jefferson Morley
Yeah. So, you know, let's go through the forensic evidence. They did a paraffin test of Oswald. The paraffin test is to see if you have been in the presence of a fired gun recently. And if Oswald fired the gun, as is alleged, the explosion coming out there would leave a trace of material on his face. So they did a paraffin test on his face, and it was negative. Okay. So they could not confirm that Oswald had fired a gun recently. There's no eyewitness testimony that puts Oswald in the window of the sixth floor. Two men were seen on that floor earlier in the day, minutes before. But there's no definitive evidence that Oswald was there. Two minutes after the assassination, as policemen ran into the building they encountered Oswald in the cafeteria on the second floor drinking a soda. So Oswald would have had to run across the sixth floor, put his rifle away, run down five flights of stairs and sit down in the cafeteria in the course of less than two minutes. The Warren Commission said that's what happened. But they didn't take the testimony of other people who were in the building on the stairs at that time, at that exact time. And nobody saw Lee Oswald on those stairs. None of the four women that were on those stairs saw him. So the case that Oswald is up in the window is not strong. And then you have the other evidence from the crime scene. Right. A lot of people thought a gunshot came from the front which, of course, could not have been fired by Oswald. Bill Newman was the eyewitness closest to the limousine probably 15ft from when Kennedy was shot. And he said that the shot came from the grassy knoll from the area behind him. Paul Landis, the Secret Service agent who came forward last year with his account of the assassination also said that he thought a shot had come from there. In fact, about 40 people said that they thought a shot came from the front. So the case that Oswald was in the sixth floor firing a gun is weak? I'd say it's possible, but it's weak forensically and has gotten weaker over the years. And the case that there was gunfire from other directions, based on the eyewitness testimony and what the Dallas doctors said about the nature of Kennedy's wounds indicates that there was probably more than one person firing at the President. Oswald might have been one of them, but the evidence is not strong that he was the only one.
- [12:18]
Don Wildman
I mentioned that Oswald was a self styled revolutionary were the words I used. Let's talk about that for a bit.
- [12:24]
Jefferson Morley
This is another thing, you know, Oswald the fanatic, Oswald the sociopath. The evidence doesn't support that. Oswald had a good friend when he lived in Moscow, a man named Ernst Titovitz who's still alive and in fact wrote a very affecting memoir on our website, JFK Facts about the Lee Harvey Oswald. He knew he was not a fanatic, he was not crazy in their political arguments. Ernst took the socialist point of view, he was a Russian and he believed in socialism. And Oswald took the other point of view, the Western point of view, that Western freedom was important. So Oswald was not a fanatic. He wanted to read 1984. He wanted to read George Orwell's book. He wrote to his mother and he said, I want to read George Orwell's book. Well, George Orwell was banned in the Soviet Union at that time. So this revolutionary actually wants to import a band writer into the Soviet Union. That's not the work of a fanatic. So the case that Oswald had any animus against President Kennedy, I mean, there's very, very little evidence of that.
- [13:27]
Don Wildman
Why had he gone to the Soviet Union?
- [13:29]
Jefferson Morley
He had read Marx as a young man. Oswald grew up poor. And Karl Marx's ideal of a classless society really appealed to him. And so that's why he moved to the Soviet Union. He soon realized, and Ernst Titovitz has talked about this, you know, the life in the Soviet Union didn't live up to his ideals, let's just put it that way. It was very drab, it was very regimented. And Oswald chafed against that and didn't like it and eventually came home. So, you know, Oswald went to the Soviet Union. He did say when he asked for admission that he hated the United States and would never return. But he changed those point of views as he came to learn more about life in the Soviet Union. So the case against Oswald is never strong, has only gotten weaker over the years. And a lot of it is built on this misconception that he was a revolutionary, he was a fanatic. There's just no evidence of that, or very little.
- [14:22]
Don Wildman
We're going to get into a conversation soon about how Americans feel about this and how so much doubt has been sowed over the years and for better or worse. But I just want to understand for the audience why Oswald, like what we're obviously suggesting here, is that he's a patsy and that he's been plucked out of the ether by these guys and made into this icon that we now live with. But why him? How did he end up in this position?
- [14:48]
Jefferson Morley
Well, here's the other thing that we've learned in recent years which is, you know, very striking and utterly unknown to anybody in 1963 or 1964. And that was the man described as a lone nut had in fact, been watched closely and constantly by senior CIA officers for four years. We now have Oswald's CIA file that was compiled before President Kennedy's assassination. Okay. This is the information they had on Oswald while President Kennedy was alive. It ran to 194 pages. They were reading Oswald's mail. They were monitoring him wherever he went. They were receiving FBI, State Department, Office of Naval Intelligence and CIA communications about him. A small group of senior officers were reading those reports on Oswald and making decisions based on them. So the idea that Oswald was manipulated by US Intelligence officers, the recent evidence makes that possibility much, much greater. We now know they had the ability to do that because they knew so much about him.
- [15:56]
Don Wildman
So this coincided with his trip to the Soviet Union. He was, in this theory pinpointed as a guy to develop for this purpose.
- [16:04]
Jefferson Morley
I'm not offering a theory. I'm describing the evidence. Okay? They started collecting intelligence on him when he went to the Soviet Union. The purpose of putting him under surveillance at that time was, according to these officials, to develop contacts or sources in the Soviet Union. So that indicates that as soon as Oswald went there, the CIA was looking at him and considering him for an intelligence role. And so those officials maintained that interest for the next four years. Now, does that mean that they manipulated him into the role of a patsy? It means they could have. Okay. I'm not saying they did. I'm telling you what definitely happened. And what definitely happened is they watched him go all the way to Dealey Plaza. So if nothing else, these senior CIA officials, led by counterintelligence chief James Angleton, you know, they were negligent. They were. I Would, you know, criminally negligent if Oswald killed the President? If Oswald didn't kill the President, well, that's maybe even worse, but that's what happened. And that's something that we didn't know. You know, the complete Oswald file was not declassified until two years ago.
- [17:13]
Don Wildman
Part of the frustration of this whole story is how much information there is. You can get a lot of impressions on the story by available sources. You can go to the house where his wife Marina lived in Arlington, Texas, and it's a very, very modest little home. I mean, it's your average small ranch style in a very normal neighborhood. The story was that Marina was taken in by this Quaker woman just out of kindness, who allowed her to live there and. But they were separated at this point. She has a young child and he would visit her on the weekends. He'd take the bus and come over and visit his, him and his wife and his wife and child there and at this house. And I actually met the woman. She's recently passed away, but she was alive and well then. And it was just kind of an ordinary thing like it was. That was what struck me most of all. And she explained to me in this little tiny kitchen that that's the door to the garage right there. And I opened the door and there was the garage, as happens in any small home. And she said, this is where the stack of books was and the rifle was in this bag. They've got a mock one there. You know, they set up a little museum in the place and that was now empty when the FBI came, which indicated to them that he had come and gotten his. The unusual thing is he arrived on a Thursday instead of the weekend, she said, and that was because Kennedy was supposedly, was coming and this is him supposedly getting ready for this. So I bring the story up only because it was mind blowing to me to see this huge iconic story come down to ordinary people in a little ordinary kitchen, you know, and it just brought home the fact that this was, you know, happening on. This whole story happens on two different levels in reality.
- [18:53]
Jefferson Morley
That's very true. And if you look at Oswald's movements and actions before and after the assassination, I think it's clear that he had guilty knowledge. He knew something was going to happen because after the assassination he's seen in the Book Depository cafeteria right afterwards and then he leaves and he goes to his boarding house and he gets a pistol. Well, he didn't take his pistol with him to work in the morning.
- [19:19]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [19:19]
Jefferson Morley
That wasn't the normal thing. When he left the book depository and the President was dead, Oswald felt he needed a pistol. So that indicates that he had guilty knowledge that he knew something about the events that had just transpired. And sure enough, as he's walking along and confronted by a police officer and the police officer seeks to stop him, Oswald shoots the police officer. So the idea that, you know, Oswald had guilty knowledge, I think that's, that's definitely true, that he was the lone gunman. That evidence is not very strong at all.
- [19:52]
Don Wildman
I mentioned the general tenor of this country in terms of this, this whole story. It's a consistent Gallup Poll did five every five years. Gallup Poll sort of asks lots of questions, of course, but one of them was did you believe in the Warren Commission's report? And every five years or so, after six decades of polling, it tells a rather remarkable story. A clear majority have never accepted the lone gun theory. At times in the 70s and 90s, as many as 80% of Americans believed others were involved. Today, the number remains high. Roughly two thirds say President Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. And sometimes it breaks down politically. More Democrats than Republicans and so forth. But it's all a rather astonishing fact that the Warren Commission Report really didn't do what it was meant to do.
- [20:39]
Jefferson Morley
When you look at the evidence in the report, it's contradictory, not convincing on its face. And then, you know what we've learned then? Two big facts that the Warren Commission was utterly ignorant of. One was the surveillance of Oswald. The Warren Commission was told by CIA officials testifying under oath that the information they had about Oswald before the assassination was, and this is a quote, minimal. Okay? Minimal is not a truthful description of 194 pages of material. So CIA officials lied under oath to the Warren Commission. I mean, that right there starts to impugn any conclusions that are based on it. The other thing that the Warren Commission didn't know was that the CIA was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro on the day President Kennedy was killed. I mean, if the CIA was out to kill Castro and he knew full well that that's what he was doing, well, then maybe he had a motive to kill the President. Right? And Oswald was a leftist. But curiously, the Warren Commission never investigated the possibility that Fidel Castro was behind the assassination of President Kennedy even though the alleged gunman was a pro Castro supporter. The Warren Commission didn't go there. They didn't want to know. So there was a lot that the Warren Commission didn't know and there was a lot that the Warren Commission didn't want to know. And the combination of that over the years has just left people saying that's not a good convincing account of what happened. We know something else happened.
- [22:15]
Don Wildman
We're going to take a break, but before I go, I'm just going to skip real quickly through all the doubts that people have, just so we have that to. To address when we come back. One shooter with a bold action rifle. Difficult to fire three accurate shots in under six seconds. Especially somebody who's not that good at shooting a rifle.
- [22:31]
Jefferson Morley
Yeah. Expert marksman could not reproduce the alleged feat that Oswald did.
- [22:36]
Don Wildman
Yeah, I stood in that book depository with a little rifle scope, though. It was a very good shot. You know, you had a direct shot there. It was right under him. So that's. And every one of these things I'm going to say has been heavily refuted and, and so forth. Warren Commission claims one bullet caused seven wounds and two men. One of the trajectories is upward. That's the magic bullet theory again. In our special, we actually showed that the Connolly's seat was down lower. So that sort of refutes it a little bit. Witnesses here, more than three shots suggest the shots come from the grassy knoll. Maybe there was an echo coming back. You know, there's all kinds of ideas about that. The Pruder film appears to show the head moving back and forth. I saw my own, another special that was done about. He's wearing a back brace. And so that's going to have a, a ricochet effect on the body when that happens.
- [23:24]
Jefferson Morley
U.S. government had that film for 12 years. Okay, okay. Nobody in that, in those 12 years when nobody had ever seen it, nobody said that that that was the explanation, that he had a spasm and moved backwards. Nobody offered that explanation to the Warren Commission. The CIA never offered verified that interpretation. That's just one of those JFK theories for which there's not a lot of evidence.
- [23:50]
Don Wildman
Well, I mention all of these things just to be an ordinary American who's caught in between. I was born in 1961. This is the story of my. This is in the backdrop of my entire life. So when we come back, let's talk about these other theories about who might have been responsible if you were going in that direction.
- [24:18]
Commercial Narrator
Okay. Only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line first, but first there, the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [24:46]
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- [25:02]
Jefferson Morley
Are you.
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- [25:15]
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- [25:45]
Don Wildman
K We are talking to Jefferson Morley of the substack jfk Facts about that which happens every November, if not more, when we consider the theories of JFK's assassination. When you're talking about a conspiracy, there are a number of entities where a conspiracy kind of steers you if you're looking for it. One of those is the CIA. What could the CIA have benefited from creating this situation?
- [26:19]
Jefferson Morley
The theories that blame the CIA have been strengthened by what we've learned in the last couple of years. That the CIA's surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald was much closer than was ever known. That top CIA officials were interested in him and watched him for four years as he made his way to Dealey Plaza. So the idea that CIA officials could have manipulated him, that notion has been strengthened in recent years. CIA officials were very unhappy and I would say not just CIA officials, national security officials in Kennedy's administration were very unhappy with the direction his presidency was taking. In 1963, President Kennedy was seeking to wind down the Cold War and made a famous speech at American University in June of 1963 calling for an end to the Cold War. He was not pursuing the invasion of Cuba, which had been strongly supported by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of staff both in 1961 and 1962. That caused a lot of consternation, especially in the CIA station in South Florida. Kennedy had many vocal enemies in the CIA hierarchy who were adamantly and violently opposed to his policies. So, you know, that's the, that's the basis for suspecting CIA involvement. And that's not a matter of, you know, something that some conspiracy theory ginned up. That's what President Lyndon Johnson said in 1967 to an aide he thought there'd been a conspiracy and he thought the CIA had been involved. So Robert Kennedy thought the same thing, Jackie Kennedy thought the same thing. And in fact, we just have a new document out now that confirms what Robert Kennedy told Soviet leaders three weeks after the assassination, which is that he believed his brother had been the victim of a large political conspiracy. That's a, quote, large political conspiracy. So, you know, when people say, well, Jeff, you know, what's your theory? I don't have a theory. I think the evidence supports the notion that the President was killed by enemies in his own government. And that's something that Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jackie Kennedy and a lot of other people thought privately. And the evidence that has come out over the years, I think supports that conclusion.
- [28:39]
Don Wildman
So would Allen Dulles have been involved in this?
- [28:42]
Jefferson Morley
The strongest case that's been presented that is in a book called the Devil's Chessboard, which is a biography of Dulles by journalist David Talbot, who interviewed a lot of people about Dulles and about the assassination. And David presents Dulles as kind of a chairman of the board of an assassination conspiracy. So that's the strongest case. Kennedy had fired Dulles as CIA director because of the Bay of Pigs. And it was a travesty that Dulles was then on the Warren Commission. I mean, that right there compromised the integrity of the Commission by putting somebody with such a blatant conflict of interest on there. But of course, that's why Johnson put him on there was to protect the CIA's interests.
- [29:26]
Don Wildman
We take this for granted. We take the CIA so for granted nowadays. But in those days, it was only a decade long organization. It had been a pretty, you know, started in the late 1960.
- [29:34]
Jefferson Morley
Yeah, it was only, it was only 15 years old in 19, in 1962.
- [29:39]
Don Wildman
And so Kennedy could have been looking at this as possibly a misfire as far as, you know, Post World War II America and how, how to treat this whole thing. So it's a fascinating idea of people looking out for themselves in this situation and, and Dulles is at the top of that list. He was a CIA director from 1953 to 1961. It was his baby. And then he ends up on the Warren Commission, which is really crazy. Oswald's visit to Mexico City has gotten a lot of publicity. This is September 1963. We're three months before the assassination. Why was he there?
- [30:10]
Jefferson Morley
As we understand it, Oswald's wife had been sending letters. She wanted to return to the Soviet Union. She was not happy in the United States. She had two small children. She didn't know English. She was not interested in Lee's political world. He felt that she wasn't there. They fought a lot, and so she wanted to go home. Oswald went to Mexico City and applied for a visa saying he wanted to go to Cuba and then to the Soviet Union. And he went to the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City to apply for those visas and was turned down. Then he came back to the United States and moved into the brooming house in Dallas. So that's what Oswald's trip. Now, what we've learned about Oswald's trip is, first of all, the CIA lied to the Warren Commission about it another lie to investigators and pretended that they didn't know that he had visited the Cuban Embassy which was not true. They knew right as soon as he visited the Cuban embassy that the local CIA surveillance teams reported that and it was reported immediately to the people who'd been watching Oswald for four years. So that was a lie that the CIA told the Warren Commission. And then, you know, he was under extensive surveillance. The Warren Commission said, we never took a picture of him. That wasn't true. CIA officers later said that they had seen surveillance pictures of Oswald shown to them by the CIA station chief. So you have this whole bodyguard of lies, so to speak, about Oswald's visit. What was really going on there? Was this a provocation? Well, you now know something that the Warren Commission did not know. That the CIA was trying to penetrate the organization that Oswald belonged to, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. They were trying to penetrate it and destroy it. Not known to investigators at the time. And, you know, when you see how closely they're watching him and how much they lie about him you know, one very rational conclusion is they're running some kind of operation around him and they don't want to talk about it now. You know, were they running an operation around Oswald and then they had no idea he was going to up and shoot the President? I mean, that's what some people say. There's not a lot of evidence to support that. I think the evidence is more consistent that somebody's running an operation around this guy and lying about it. So the Mexico City story remains unexplained except we now know it was the object of intense interest. So the idea that Oswald's some kind of lone gunman he's not lone in the sense of he's not being observed. He was closely observed by top CIA officers six weeks before Kennedy was Killed.
- [32:55]
Don Wildman
There's a newly redacted memo that involves Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, who then goes on write famous books. Yes, this is critical. His memo is critical of the CIA and its role in shaping foreign policy. And he warns Kennedy in this memo. Can you address that a bit?
- [33:11]
Jefferson Morley
Arthur Schlesinger was a historian, a good friend of JFK's. And when Kennedy became President, he came to the White House as a kind of advisor. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in which the CIA invasion brigade was defeated, Kennedy was furious at the CIA. He felt he'd been given a bad plan. And he asked Arthur Schlesinger, what can we do about the CIA? Schlesinger had done intelligence work during World War II, so he knew the world of US intelligence. And he wrote a memo, 15 page memo to Kennedy. Here's what you can do about the CIA. And Schlesinger's point was twofold. One, the CIA is encroaching on your policy making ability because it's so big and so vast. And in the memo, Schlesinger, he'd done a lot of research about how the CIA worked. And these findings were withheld for the last 60 years. And once they were revealed last March, you could see why the CIA wanted to keep this hidden because it showed how deep the penetration was of the CIA. Schlesinger said to Kennedy, on the day you were inaugurated, 47% of State Department officers worldwide were actually CIA officers. Right? Half of the people gathering intelligence on the world for the US Government, half of them were actually CIA officers, not State Department officers. And Schlesinger says, you know, this gives them the ability to make policy and you just have to follow along. And so Schlesinger recommends reorganizing the CIA. So this was the reality that the CIA was trying to hide. Why did Kennedy want to reorganize the CIA? Because Arthur Schlesinger gave him some good reasons why he should want to do that. That's one of the things that we have just learned now that doesn't bear directly on the assassination, but it confirms this story that the CIA's role in the events of 1963 was far, far greater than the Warren Commission knew. It was even greater than congressional investigators knew in the 70s. It was greater than historians knew five years ago. So we're really getting Tom, to a granular level of understanding just how closely Oswald was watched, why he was watched, the types of dirty tricks, operations really that are going on around him. And we understand, you know, much more how the presidential security in Dallas broke down and the President could be shot dead by daylight.
- [35:53]
Don Wildman
How much would the FBI have been a part of this?
- [35:56]
Jefferson Morley
The FBI's role was mostly to immediately convict Oswald and never investigate any other possibility. J Editor Hoover was perfectly happy that JFK was dead. He was more happy. Lyndon Johnson was a close friend. He did not trust Kennedy because he was liberal. And he was perfectly happy that he was dead. And he never made any effort to investigate the crime except to blame it all on Oswald. No, the FBI didn't have any role in Kennedy's assassination. I don't believe that they had a role in making sure that it wasn't investigated. That was their role.
- [36:28]
Don Wildman
What about the meeting between James Hosti, the FBI agent before the assassination with Oswald? Do you know about that? Where his notes were destroyed by his superior.
- [36:37]
Jefferson Morley
So James Hostie was a FBI agent in Dallas who was assigned to monitor Marina Oswald because she was a foreign national living in the United States. And so he would visit her every so often. Oswald felt that he was harassing her and he went to the FBI office to complain. This was about a week before the assassination. And he left a note with the secretary. He talked with them briefly and complained that Hostie was harassing his wife and he wanted him to stop. And he left a note which voiced his complaint. And after the assassination, two days after the assassination, they said, well, Hosti came to his boss and said, what do we do about this? And his boss, Gordon Shanklin said, well, it's too late now. Just destroy it. And so Hostie destroyed the note. Okay. Obstruction of justice. Destroying material evidence in a homicide case by an FBI agent, very serious offense. And if the note supported the official version, you know, that Oswald alone killed the President, why would you destroy it? I mean, why would you destroy it in any case? And Hostie never admitted it. Gordon Shanklin never admitted it. A Dallas newspaper reporter figured it out a decade later, and there was no refuting the story. It was definitely true. And it was again, another thing that just showed the government's case was weak and it was marred by, you know, official misconduct. The destruction of material evidence by a law enforcement officer.
- [38:06]
Don Wildman
What would have been in that note of that they wanted to hide?
- [38:09]
Jefferson Morley
The secretary who received the note said that she glanced at it and that it had some kind of threat in it. People then said, oh, well, look, you know, Oswald was a violent guy. Well, if he was a violent guy and was threatening him, why wouldn't they have made that public? That would have supported the official story. Instead, they destroy the note. So, you know, the only conclusion is that the note did not support the official story. That's the only possible conclusion that you can reach. And so, you know, what did it say? We don't know. But we do know that Oswald was complaining about this, you know, FBI contact with his wife. So that's the story.
- [38:46]
Don Wildman
I mean, the natural conclusion for many people was that the Soviet Union was involved. You know, Oswald's married to a foreign national, blah, blah, blah. He's got Communist sympathies. Why not? You know, he's obviously an agent of the Soviets.
- [38:59]
Jefferson Morley
But, you know what's interesting about that? Don't. The CIA and the US Government never thought that, not for one second. Anatoly Dobrynin was the Soviet Ambassador to the United States. He was there forever. He was their America expert. And after the assassination, Dobrynin's shocked. Finds out that Oswald has a background in Russia. He's very worried. Goes to the funeral, and then has a meeting with US Officials the next day. He's thinking that, you know, they're going to, like, they're going to blame us for killing the President. You know, is there going to be a war? You know? And he goes into the meeting and he said, the US Officials could not drop the subject fast enough. They were totally uninterested in anything about Oswald's connections to the Communist world. They didn't want to talk about it. Let's move on. And Dobrynin was. Was surprised and amazed that there was no interest in Oswald's, you know, Soviet connections. So the KGB then did a study, and this is what just came out now. And this is what's in the Russian government's dossier that's just been released. The KGB had Oswald under surveillance in the Soviet Union. And they wrote a memo kind of explaining what he did, their interest in him. And they weren't interested in recruiting him for a spy because they thought he was a mediocre personality. And for the same reason, they doubted that he had been sent by the Americans as a spy because he didn't really seem like somebody who was qualified to do that. So we now have that Soviet assessment of Oswald that was also delivered to the Americans back in 1963. Okay, there is that theory. The KGB was behind the assassination. Very little evidence to support it, and I would say, among serious scholars, very little support. Virtually no one thinks that that's what happen.
- [41:00]
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- [42:06]
Don Wildman
The next two categories. I have three. The two involve Cuba. You know, you've got pro Castro Cuban government forces involved. And then you've got the Stone theory, the Oliver Stone movie theory, which is the right wing extremist coming out of the Bay of Pigs, et cetera, creating this whole effort going on that then feeds into the Mafia. All of this stuff, which we'll talk about in detail in a moment. This is all what we hope is covered in the fabled files that we one day will see. Is that correct?
- [42:36]
Jefferson Morley
I mean, we are seeing the files. There's not a lot of JFK material that is known to exist that is not public. So we have the US Government's records. Now we're getting some of the Russian government's records. There's not a lot of, you know, more JFK records to be disclosed that I know of or that anybody knows of. Now, you know, that's not to say that there isn't more to be known. There is. But in terms of records known to exist held by the US government, there's not a lot of those records.
- [43:09]
Don Wildman
Oh, that's so disappointing to me. I thought we were, we were waiting for this every time.
- [43:13]
Jefferson Morley
I think it's terrific. People should understand we've made great strides in understanding Kennedy's assassination in the last three or four years. And the job now is not to, you know, find new records, it's to understand what we've just found. Because what we've gotten in the last couple of years is what the government wanted to hide the longest, you know, and so it's highly significant. It's not simple. These are CIA operations, They're very well concealed and they're designed to resist understanding, to be plausibly deniable. But we've learned a lot and that's what matters right now.
- [43:52]
Don Wildman
Boy, the Mafia connection holds up for me in so many ways.
- [43:56]
Jefferson Morley
We know the Mafia role The Mafia role was to eliminate Lee Harvey Oswald. And they enlisted Jack Ruby to do that. And I was on Piers Morgan's show a little while ago with a guy named Michael Franzine who had had kind of been a Mafia guy, lieutenant for these big bosses for many years. And then he's turned state's witness and now he talks about organized crime on tv. And he said, and I found this very convincing. He said among the prime bosses who he worked with, their understanding was what was our role? Our role was to eliminate Oswald. That was our role in the Kennedy events. And that's what happened. Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner in Dallas. Came out of the Chicago Mafia when he was Jack Rubenstein, which was the Al Capone Sam Giancana family. He aspired to be a Mafia guy. He liked those kind of people. He did what they wanted him to do, which was eliminate the witness so that he couldn't talk about what had actually happened.
- [44:58]
Don Wildman
And they'd done a lot of that in their lives. I guess against the backdrop of the Kennedy administration's campaign against the mob, I guess they couldn't have been more pleased to help out. And according to that theory.
- [45:09]
Jefferson Morley
Yeah, I mean, was the Mafia involved in the gunfire in Dealey Plaza? I don't think so. I mean, when the Mafia kills somebody, they shoot them in the back of the head. You know, they blow up their car. They don't do precision gunfire in broad daylight on a moving target. That's just not a Mafia modus apparandi. So no, the Mafia is not involved in the, the assassination itself. They're involved in the assassination of Oswald.
- [45:37]
Don Wildman
Boy, oh boy. Well, let's circle back to the Cuban story. That is a heavy duty story about so many different tangles. Just watch the movie. We can't even get into it right now. There's so many angles on that stuff.
- [45:49]
Jefferson Morley
Oliver Stone's movie. First of all, it's a movie, okay? It's not a documentary. It's a Hollywood picture. Yes, it takes liberties with the truth, but you know, the anti Castro Cubans, I mean at a functional level, there is no difference between anti Castro Cubans and the CIA. All of the anti Castro Cubans were working with or supported by the CIA. So there's no difference between those two theories.
- [46:17]
Don Wildman
Well, I think what we're coming up with, I mean, boy, Jefferson, it sounds. I don't want to dumb this whole conversation down to a simplistic idea here and you've refuted that already, which is you're not offering a theory, you're you're pointing out the evidence and that this is a process of winnowing out the bad evidence from the good. I guess this is where we're at here 60 years later. So we are not solving this case here. We didn't intend to. We're just taking a measure of this mystery, which remains a mystery, I guess, till we're gone. Right, Jeff?
- [46:49]
Jefferson Morley
Like I said, we have learned a whole lot recently. And I think that common understanding could be reshaped by what we've learned in the last couple of years. I mean, here's another thing we never knew before, Doug. The CIA itself did not believe the lone gunman theory. We learned in 2017, a document came out which showed that the CIA station in Miami investigated the crime in the week after the assassination. So at a time when the Dallas police, the Secret Service, the White House, the FBI, and all the major newspapers in the United States were saying this one guy alone did it, the CIA in South Florida did not believe it. And the officers were tasked with questioning their Cuban agents. A series of questions. Who in the anti Castro community had money and guns? Who left Miami inexplicably, a whole series of questions. None of which focused on Lee Harvey Oswald, none of which focused on Fidel Castro. All of which focused on anti Castro, anti JFK, Cubans known to the CIA at revelation. The CIA hid this for 50 years. That was interesting. The second interesting thing about the revelation is, so what did they find out? Did they confirm that Oswald did it? Did the CIA ever confirm that in their investigation? They never released the results of that internal investigation. And we've never seen it to this day. So, you know, again, the government itself did not believe the official story following that theory.
- [48:29]
Don Wildman
I mean, forget the movie, there's film of Oswald in the jail declaring himself a patsy. That man we're looking at by this theory is someone who is aware of his role in that he did fire a gun and that he had guilt and he had to carry a pistol and shoot a police officer afterwards. But he's in this theory, his gears are worrying while he's being kept in, in jail, as he's realizing this is more than meets the eye, that this was way more. But it's just so screwy, you know, to try to fit those pieces together, which is why we're still at this place, right? This is what's going.
- [49:03]
Jefferson Morley
Another thing that we've learned in the last 20 years is that false flag operations, I mean now everybody talks about false flag operations and you know, everything's a false flag operation.
- [49:14]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [49:15]
Jefferson Morley
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But that's a false flag operation. That's a psyop. But the fact is, why do people talk about false flag operations? Because there was a false flag operation in effect in 1963, totally unknown to the Warren Commission, totally unknown to congressional investigators in the 1970s, was not made public till 1997, and that was that false flag operations were the policy of the Pentagon in 1963. And one particular one that had been adopted by the Pentagon was that they would stage a heinous crime, a spectacular attack on a US Target and use the CIA to blame Castro for the crime. And then that way the US Would have a justification for invading Cuba. This was pentagon policy in 1963. Well, on November 22nd, somebody staged a spectacular attack on a U.S. target. President Kennedy and CIA assets immediately seek to blame the crime on Castro. Okay, what was going on there? Something was going on there that the CIA never wanted anybody to know about. That's what was going on. So I guess what I'm saying, Don, is we've learned a lot in the last few years. The official story is not supported by the preponderance of evidence. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the President was hit by gunfire from two different directions, that there was incredible secrecy around his connections to U.S. intelligence. And you know, who was responsible for all of this? We don't know, but we have a much clearer picture. And the clearer picture kind of eliminates Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of President Kennedy. That's not what the evidence tells us.
- [51:07]
Don Wildman
There we go. And this is to be discussed further on your excellent podcast and substacks, JFK Facts.
- [51:13]
Jefferson Morley
This is an ongoing emerging story with the new Russian dossier, with the new documents that have come out this year. And people can catch up on keep up with the story at JFK facts. JFKfacts.substack.com Excellent.
- [51:27]
Don Wildman
Thank you so much, Jefferson.
- [51:28]
Jefferson Morley
Thank you, Don.
- [51:34]
Don Wildman
Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit. A podcast from History Hit.
- [51:46]
Jefferson Morley
Foreign.
- [51:52]
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