#422 - “Coverup WORSE!” - New JFK Files are Missing More than You Thought | Stu Wexler

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #422: "Coverup WORSE!" - Missing JFK Files & More with Stu Wexler

Date: May 15, 2026
Host: Julian Dorey
Guest: Stu Wexler (historian, investigative journalist, co-author of Killing King)
Theme:
Exploring the persistence of government secrecy around the JFK and MLK assassinations, the controversy over newly released (yet still incomplete) files, and the deeper, messier truths about what has and hasn’t come to light. Wexler shares decades of research into the tangled web of official investigations, conspiracies, Klan infiltration, government cover-ups, and why so many files and answers remain elusive today.

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Episode Overview

Julian and Stu dig into the underbelly of America's most infamous political assassinations, focusing on:

• The incomplete and potentially manipulated release of new JFK files
• Historical government investigations (and their abrupt dead-ends)
• Persistent questions about coordinated cover-ups vs. institutional incompetence
• How organized crime, intelligence services, and white supremacist groups may have intersected
• The enduring legacy of secrecy and trust breakdown between US citizens and their government

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reassessment of Official Investigations

Timecodes: 00:11–03:58

• 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA):

  • Formed during a period of deep public distrust of the FBI and CIA.
  • "In both cases, JFK and MLK, they concluded that there was a likely conspiracy in both crimes." (Stu, [00:38])
  • Despite these findings, the Justice Department only superficially re-examined JFK’s case, focusing on debunking "acoustics evidence" (alleged gunshot impulses captured on a dictabelt during the assassination).

• Acoustics Evidence Debate:

  • The contention centered around the timing of supposed gunshots in recorded police radio transmissions.
  • The DOJ's dismissal “let that go away. But in many cases, King assassination was even worse. I don't believe they even at that time did any kind of legitimate investigation..." (Stu, [04:23])
  • The search for “the magic bullet” and lone-gunman theories failed to match accumulating evidence or official conclusions.

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2. The Problem of Conspiracies, Disinformation & Cover Stories

Timecodes: 06:48–11:35

• Urban Legends & Outlandish Confessions:
  Both host and guest stress the need to vet sources—stories of secret shooters emerging from sewers, random prison confessions, or “I saw Oswald years later” abound, polluting the historical record.

• Keeping Secrets:
  “Now the premise... that nothing substantial could possibly have been kept secret for that long... is actually false.” (Stu, [11:35])
  Wexler and his co-author demonstrate that many people did talk, although much was ignored, suppressed, or forgotten.

• On why people didn’t talk:
  "If nobody else says anything, you're a goner. Right. You need like 35 other people to say it with you or you're not... Especially when you get the stuff where it's your life. Right. If you say something like when you're talking assassinations or organized crime, anything along those lines... losing a job is something, but losing your life, pretty bad." (Stu, [15:54])

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3. Compartmentalization: How Big Plots Stay Secret

Timecodes: 16:15–22:28

• Power Structure & Plausible Deniability:
  Most involved in the intelligence community or military "had no idea" even as few at the top might.

  “Not if they're getting killed when someone comes out... you are talking about such a low number of people in the highest part of the structure who are complicit... whose job is to fucking stay silent. They literally do kill you if you don't.” (Julian, [17:17])

• Bobby Kennedy’s Cautious Paranoia:
  Bobby trusted few—after JFK, he worried that his own covert actions (especially anti-Castro plots) may have triggered or facilitated the assassination.

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4. Deep Politics & Double Conspiracies

Timecodes: 31:08–37:09

• Peter Dale Scott’s Framework:
  Two overlapping plots:

  1. The actual plotters who killed JFK
  2. Those at the top who “cover it up” to avoid rocking the geopolitical boat

  “The first conspiracy is the one that actually killed Kennedy. The second one is to cover it up.” (Stu, [31:52])

• World War III Anxiety as Cover-Up Fuel:
  Internal documents, Johnson’s phone calls, and staff testimony show real fear that linking the killing to Cuba or the Soviets could trigger global conflict. This justified aggressive, rapid information control.

  “You tell them, okay, you want to... come out with the full autopsy report. Then you tell me where the nearest bomb shelter is because that's where you're going to have to go when this lands on the doors of the Soviets.” (Stu, [32:23])

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5. Chaotic Evidence, Overlapping Motives & the Challenge of Truth

Timecodes: 34:24–46:58

• Sinister Medical Cover-Ups:
  Accounts from inside the JFK autopsy reveal Pentagon types intimidating doctors and outright telling them what to (and not to) do.

• Why It's So Messy:
  “There's like seven reasons on so many levels for there to be a cover up where it's not consciousness of guilt. It is wanting to avoid World War 3. It is wanting to protect sensitive operations. It is wanting to cover up your negligence and incompetence...” (Stu, [34:24])

  “The biggest problem with... Kennedy, like the case itself and looking at it, is fucking everyone hated this guy, correct? Perhaps with the exception of Khrushchev...” (Julian, [37:09])

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6. Deep History of CIA & Covert Operations

Timecodes: 44:36–62:55

• Truman’s Hidden Warning:
  Harry Truman wrote a largely buried 1963 op-ed questioning the CIA’s purpose and warning against its morph into a covert operational (not just intelligence-gathering) agency. Dulles personally visited Truman after.

• Guatemala 1954 Coup:
  The “template” for future CIA actions—successful regime change driven by the Dulles brothers’ ties to United Fruit, catalyzing similar actions in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran.

• Naming Names:
  Wexler and Julian walk through key players (Carl Jenkins, David Morales, Felix Rodriguez, William Harvey)—connecting mid-50s coups, Castro plots, and “plausible deniability” culture with later US assassinations and scandals.
  "If I had to bet on people, they would be my candidates for who I would do at least a grand jury investigation of." (Stu, [61:33])

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7. The Structure of Modern Cover-Ups & Persistent Secrecy

Timecodes: 98:39–116:45

• 2020s Document Releases:
  Despite tens of thousands of pages released, entire streams of files are “missing,” withheld, or mysteriously incomplete, stoking ongoing distrust.
  “There’s smoke and you’ll get people who will fight over it... The question is, do you think there Was smoke that we haven’t... it sounds like you’re saying there was smoke previously. Haven’t.” (Julian, [111:41])

• Who’s stonewalling?:
  Jeff Morley’s dogged FOIA suits, plus new Congressional pressure (e.g., Luna’s committee), hint at entrenched resistance from agencies who “gatekeep” releases, possibly to cover up not direct guilt but sensitive operations, embarrassing failures, and more.

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8. The MLK Assassination—A Tangled Web of Racist Conspiracies

Timecodes: 135:13–183:43

The "Official Story"—and its Flaws

• James Earl Ray as a “Lone Gunman”:

  • Pleads guilty, receives 99 years, then recants—claims he was set up by a mysterious handler “Raul”.

• The Bounty Plot:

  • Wexler lays out powerful evidence (including interview clips) of a $100,000 bounty put out by the most violent Klan group in America (White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi), outsourced through criminal networks to maintain deniability, with complicit or negligent FBI oversight.

  “A key thing to think. He says he neither said no, and he neither said yes... He goes to Georgia and this guy Floyd Ayers approaches him, gives him a package... And later on found out that in the package was a hundred thousand dollars supposedly for the King assassination.” (Stu, [163:43])

  • FBI had direct warning about the bounty a year in advance, but "the FBI then proceeds… to do a superficial investigation." [167:48]

• Cover-Ups and Post-Facto Incompetence:
  Pattern: If a person wasn't physically present at the crime scene on assassination day, the FBI eliminated them as suspects—even notorious Klan bombers and hitmen.

Who Pulled the Trigger? Motives, Money, and Messy Truth

• Wexler’s Synthesis:

  • The Klan’s most extreme faction, motivated by an apocalyptic Christian Identity theology, wanted to trigger a race war by killing the most influential voice for nonviolence—King.
  • James Earl Ray may have been a greedy, expendable pawn, intended only to track or deliver a weapon to pros—but seeing an opportunity (“I’m gonna try and get the full 100. I'll get the 10 for stalking him and I'll do the shooting. Why am I gonna let another person get 90 thou? I have the gun, money.” [178:41]) he acted alone and botched their timing.

• FBI’s Role:

  • At best, gross negligence; at worst, they “let it happen,” busily infiltrating and monitoring the Klan while ignoring clear warnings and even suppressing the bounty plot evidence.

• “Why does Ray keep hiring white supremacist lawyers if he was a patsy?”
  “First off, he's in prison, right?... you better have some white supremacist protection in prison now. So he cannot say it was white supremacists..." (Stu, [179:08])

FBI (and Systemic) Hostility

• J. Edgar Hoover viewed King as a threat:
  Intense surveillance, slander campaigns, and possibly willful disregard for imminent threats.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "In both cases, JFK and MLK, they concluded that there was a likely conspiracy in both crimes." (Stu, [00:38])
• "You have to be so careful about people who come after the fact..." (Stu, [07:14])
• "If nobody else says anything, you're a goner. You need like 35 other people to say it with you or you're not... especially when your life is on the line." (Stu, [15:54])
• "What if that was the plan all along?" (Julian, [31:03])
• "There's like seven reasons on so many levels for there to be a cover up where it's not consciousness of guilt. It is wanting to avoid World War 3. It is wanting to protect sensitive operations..." (Stu, [34:24])
• "I'm probably one of the people who's closer to two or three [out of ten] on the conspiracy scale. We think something happened, but it's... a lot more incompetent than you think." (Stu, [11:00])
• "They were proactively trying to pour gasoline on the fire every time they could do it... they were some of the first accelerationists..." (Stu, [151:05]) discussing the Klan as ideological terrorists
• “We have two times where [the FBI] did that. Now, two things. Something to note to the people who think the FBI actually literally shot people... They do it through proxies, they let it happen, and then you get canceled." (Stu, [192:21])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:38 – HSCA’s “likely conspiracy” findings for JFK and MLK
• 03:58–06:48 – Acoustics/gunshots evidence in JFK case
• 31:52 – Peter Dale Scott’s “two conspiracies” framework
• 34:24 – Sinister autopsy/autopsy cover-up details
• 44:36 – Truman’s op-ed about the CIA, cover-up patterns
• 54:09 – CIA arms laundering, front companies, criminal banking
• 61:42 – Identifying top suspects in 1950s/60s regime change operations
• 98:39 – Discussion of recent “JFK file releases”
• 100:43 – William Harvey (“ZR Rifle”), suspicions, CIA-Nazi-Mafia nexus
• 135:13 – FBI’s surveillance and antagonism toward MLK
• 151:05 – Klan’s accelerationist Christian Identity theology
• 163:44 – Don Nissen’s testimony about the MLK bounty plot
• 170:25–172:02 – FBI’s investigation into the bounty plot
• 178:41 – Wexler’s theory: Ray tries for the whole bounty
• 192:21 – FBI as indirect participants (proxies, informants, “let it happen”)

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Conclusion

This marathon episode lays bare what decades of research, FOIA fights, and personal interviews have revealed: America’s most consequential assassinations remain thick with gatekeeping, missing evidence, and murky intersections of state, criminal, and extremist actors. Stu Wexler brings a nuanced, evidence-driven skepticism—not all-powerful conspiracy, but a web of plots, denials, bad faith actors, and institutional failures that—60 years later—still profoundly shape public trust and American history.

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Further Resources

• Stu Wexler's book: [Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King by Stuart Wexler & Larry Hancock]
• Relevant reporting: Jeff Morley’s JFK Facts (for ongoing file releases and research advocacy)
• References: Peter Dale Scott’s "Deep Politics," David Talbot's "Devil’s Chessboard," and Guy Banister investigation material

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Note: Advertisements, intros, and outros have been excluded. This summary prioritizes content, chronology, and clear speaker attribution, and provides context for those unfamiliar with the podcast.

Transcript

[Interviewer]

Foreign.

[Julian]

So I. I didn't realize this because now, like, obviously we know they covered up the JFK thing forever and all that. But a couple things in there. First of all, you said there was a late. There was investigation in the late 70s that ran concurrent between JFK and MLK.

[Stu]

So there was a group that was formed called the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

[Julian]

It.

[Stu]

It's not an accident. Came in the late 1970s because we started to get all of the revelations about all the dirty stuff the FBI and the CIA were up to. People already were, you know, suspicious of both crimes. And now they had the record about all the other nefarious stuff the government was up to. So they said, you know, we need to really go back into the Kennedy assassination and the King assassination. We're going to create a select committee like a small subdivision, and we're just gonna dedicate it to investigating both assassinations separately. Similar investigators, same congresspeople involved. And in both cases. This is why I get crazy when people say the official version is lone assassin in these cases. In both cases, JFK and mlk, they concluded that there was a likely conspiracy in both crimes.

[Julian]

And this was publicly released that they concluded that?

[Stu]

Correct. So really and truly the official version is that there was a likely conspiracy in both JFK's assassination and MLK's assassination. And they had asked the Justice Department to try and follow through. The Justice Department did what I would argue is a fairly superficial relook into JFK and decided that there was one piece of evidence we could talk about if you want, that they thought the entire House Select Committee was based on. And since they argue that they debunked it, they didn't have to do a JFK assassination.

[Julian]

What was that?

[Stu]

That was the acoustics evidence.

[Julian]

Acoustics evidence.

[Stu]

So there was supposedly, and I'll be honest I am, I waver between being deeply skeptical to being just not sure about this piece of evidence. But there was a recording that was supposed to happen, been recorded on a stuck mic on one of the motorcycle officers in Dealey Plaza during Kennedy's assassination. That they only kind of realized what the potential was of this thing years later. So they gave it to computer programmers and they gave it to acoustics experts. Were there gunshots recorded on this film? Was it recorded in Dealey Plaza? Does it have gunshots? Can we tell where the gunshots are coming from? And they concluded then that there was a very high likelihood that there were gunshots that came. At least one came from the grassy knoll. However, there's A lot of questions about that acoustics evidence and some of it was addressed by the Justice Department when they had a separate group. Just look at that scientific group, look at that recording.

[Julian]

Was this the same scientific group that looked at the magic bullet?

[Stu]

No, no, no, no. This was, this was a group that was just like experts in physics and acoustics. And the big issue was, is that there's a, there's recording on that, that like, of this cross talk. So you know that the cops were like, let's be on guard while we're in Dilly Plaza. Oh crap, the President's just been shot. Right? We have that stuff on, we have that stuff on, on, on like recording and on transcript timed right so you can, you could look at that stuff. And it got supposedly accidentally recorded over on the stuck mic. So in theory, if you can figure out what's going on sound wise, crosstalk wise.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Stu]

You could time the, the recording of the supposed shots.

[Julian]

Yeah, it's corroborating from vantage points effectively.

[Stu]

When you do that, you've wind up with a situation where it certainly looks like the sounds that they said were gun impulses, or I should say bullet fire impulses, came after the President had left Dealey Plaza.

[Julian]

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

[Stu]

Thank you. There's some thought that the, that the needle on that microphone jumped like there was like, you know, it was stuck and then it jumped forward. So it recorded later physically on the device than it actually did in real time. And so it really is shots. But that's a low percentage as other people would argue. It's also probably a low percentage that you get shots, impulses on a microphone recording that seem to align pretty closely to Zapruder film, I would say. So there's. You've got this battle. It's very tricky to make sense of, but the Justice Department clearly went in the direction of, oh, these can't be gunshots because they were recorded after based on the crosstalk. So we're not even gonna bother conveniently with everything else you found out and interview people and potentially prosecute people. We're just gonna let that go away. But in many cases, King assassination was even worse. I don't believe they even at that time did any kind of legitimate investigation into the King assassination as a result of what was sent by the House Elect Committee on Assassinations, even though in both cases likely conspiracy conclusion.

[Julian]

Yeah, and they're both obviously Bad. And then in the middle of all this, by the way, there's RFK during the 60s, too, which you're also an expert on. Correct. I'm sure we'll talk about that, too, but. All right. A lot of things there. First of all, I had Johnny Russo in here maybe 24 episodes after you in number 184. And he says a lot of things. Some things you're like, I don't know. Other things are like, oh, maybe. But he was. I was asking him, you know, how they get Kenny. He goes, they were down in the sewer. And I'm like, the sewer? He's like, yeah, they were down there. And then they. They ran on the ground.

[Stu]

No one ever saw. So there is a theory of a sewer shooting. There is, like, a place where it theoretically could have happened. And that. Theoretically, you could have gotten into the tunnel system and gotten away. Theoretically. I think people who. And then the people who did this, I shouldn't mention are people who think that there was a conspiracy. It wasn't like, you know, I'm an official debunker who looked into it and, like, went into, like, the. The place in Daily Pause where it happened, and they knew some thing or two about guns, and I think they said that it just doesn't work from a ballistics angle, situation, firearm situation. So I've always been super skeptical of the. The sewer angle.

[Julian]

Yeah. I'm also always skeptical of the guys who. You know, I've heard a million of these stories where some dude in prison, like, claimed he was the dude that did it or some guy later in life claimed he was the dude who did it to another, like, underworld person. It's like, you know, in.

[Stu]

In. In all three assassinations, but Kennedy to the tenth power.

[Julian]

Oh, yeah.

[Stu]

You have to be so careful about people who come after the fact.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Stu]

Right. The people who have stuff that you can look at before the fact. Like, I have that in King assassination. We could talk about it. They. I take a whole lot more seriously in Kennedy assassination. I've had crazy, crazy interactions with people where, like. And. And it happens more than once. My favorite. I was. I was 17 years old. Right. That's how long I've been. I've been into this.

[Julian]

17. Looking into this.

[Stu]

Right. Longer. I've been into it since I was 12. The books were all over my house. Right. I used to present in middle and high school. Yeah.

[Julian]

That's actually really cool.

[Stu]

So I went. I went down when the first files were released. That's how much of a Kennedy assassination I was at that young an age, got on tv. That's a crazy story, but I'm in an elevator with my father. We're going up to go check the first files. This is at the original archives before NARA even had officially opened. There's this guy on the. On the elevator with us, and he's in, like, overalls. He looks like he just came from a paint job after he went underneath someone's car and fixed their muffler or something, right? He was dirty, as you could ever imagine, with which looked like oil. And he had paint all over him, right? And he starts. He starts up a conversation. He's like, you guys here for Kennedy assassination? And I'm like, yeah. So he says, yeah, I've been. I've been needing to look into something. Says ever since I was at the monastery, I'm like, bro, if you were at a monastery, you had a real, real life change. And he said. He says to me, yeah, I was. I was in there. And we was one of those monasteries where nobody's allowed to talk very much, and you're, like, just eating bread and water. And then we got this one guy who no one was allowed to even, like, approach. And, you know, he's always in his, like, monk garb with, like, a hoodie on. But one day I accidentally bumped into him, and sure enough, it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

[Julian]

Oh, get the fuck out.

[Stu]

And I said, what year was this? And he's like, oh, it's like 1988, all right? And I'm like. He's like. And he's like. And he goes like. And I dug into it, and he. It was a fake shooting. And I'm like, people have argued that before. I said, you say this is 1988. And I said, you know, that they exhumed him in 1983, and it was him, so it couldn't have been him in 1988. So we get out of the elevator. He doesn't get out on the floor where the files are. He just waits for the elevator to close and go straight down. Never saw him again.

[Julian]

You know what's funny, though, too Stu? We. We're having, like, this giant existential just moment of questioning everything because there are such crazy things that we're seeing in the Epstein files that I'm also really trying to keep my head screwed on to look at everything else that's not Epstein and Epstein as well, but especially things that have nothing to do with it, with, like, a clear view and trying to follow evidence and not pull on threads too Hard and just assume it's the 10th power of whatever the 10th power is. That said, I have to say, when you see things as blatantly as we're seeing it right now, and clearly how long that went on, you know, it makes you wonder about everything else now. Do I think they had fucking AI in 1963 to be able to like fuck with the Zapruder film and change it back? That. No, I don't. But it is interesting to hear that the, you know, not from paint guy under the car, but from other credible people that we hear talk about this who have suggested that maybe what you saw isn't exactly what you saw.

[Stu]

Well, you know, even seven, eight years ago, and I was somebody who in all three crimes, I'm, I'm probably on the scale of like, you know, one to everyone in humanity and aliens killed somebody within the conspiracy research field, if you think it's a field, I'm probably one of the people who's closer to two or three. Like, in other words, we think something happened, but it's, it's a lot less complicated, a lot messier, a lot more incompetent than you think.

[Julian]

We got to get those numbers up.

[Stu]

Yeah, but here's what I'd say. Over the last eight years, you know, one of the main things that people will say to you is nothing that big or nothing that substantial could possibly have been kept secret for that long. Now the premise, it's, it's, it's a bad syllogism, right? Because both the major and the minor premise, as I'll get to the major, the minor, is that nothing was actually said is actually false. One of my co author on the King books, Larry Hancock, wrote a book called Somebody Would have Talked based on this whole, that whole idea. Nobody ever said anything about the Kennedy assassination. Somebody would have said something. And in fact, people did say stuff. Now some of it's controversial, but if you ever read his book, he does a pretty darn good job of getting down to the ones where you really have to scratch your head and say, did this person hint at the Kennedy assassination immediately before and did this person hinted at it immediately after? Before anybody could have known things.

[Julian]

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[Stu]

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[Julian]

Stu, did you ever read Devil's Chessboard by Talbot?

[Stu]

I've read parts of it with, with. With Alan Dulles. Yeah, well, getting to that. Just real quick, if I could finish this, please. The bigger theories, like the idea, the bigger premise, which is the idea that you can't keep this stuff hidden. Between what happened with the Catholic Church and sexual predation. What happened with Bill Cosby for decades, what happened with Harvey Weinstein for decades. Right? The amount of people who Kind of sort of knew. Yeah, but, you know, and I've been in this experience before where you kind of sort of know something but no one wants to say anything because the. If nobody else says anything, you're a goner. Right. You need like 35 other people to say it with you or you're not. Especially when you get the stuff where it's your life. Right. That's on the line there. Right. If you say something like when you're talking assassinations or organized crime, anything along those lines, it's. I mean, losing a job is something, but losing your life, pretty bad.

[Julian]

Yep.

[Stu]

So I've come to think that both things are not necessarily true. I'm still more skeptical of the larger conspiracy keeping quiet thing. I'm just not as skeptical as I was even eight years ago.

[Julian]

Yeah. The reason I ask about Devil's Chessboard is because, I mean, it's an amazing book. I cite it all the time. But that really the way Talbot, like, source that and explain the power structure, not even explained it, painted you the picture of it. Consistently, story after story over decades made me rethink how I would think about a major secret being kept. And here's what I mean by that. I used to think that, oh, too many people would have to know about this thing and they'd never be able to keep a lid on it. Not if they're getting killed when someone comes out and the other 35 are afraid to do it in their little subsection of the station. Right. And so even with something like Kennedy, what really put it in perspective for me is I'm just making up a number here. But, you know, imagine a hundred thousand people worked at CIA, in the Pentagon. Let me just keep it simple like that. 99, 950. Some of them at least, maybe more, had no idea that was going to happen that day. And so when you are talking about such a low number of people in the highest part of the structure who are complicit to. To make that decision and probably make a deal with organized crime and all these other elements as well, whose job is to fucking stay silent. They literally do kill you if you don't. You know, I gotta think that it would be allowed to happen to the point that once people did start talking five years, six years, seven years later, it would already be in the public consciousness. Is like, A, back then they could cover it up because there's no Internet. And B, people will be like, no, we've already heard the story. This guy's just looking for clout.

[Stu]

And Then.

[Julian]

And then they get ostracized or whatever. And then the other people who are ready to come corroborate are like, nope, I'm not doing this. And that's something you've heard across all the cases you cited. The same effect happened over many years.

[Stu]

And. And the other thing is, is these are organizations that are self selected for people who could keep a secret. Like if you're a blabber mouth and it becomes obvious you don't stay in. That's right, CIA covert operations very long. And I have enormous respect for David and his book and I have a lot of issues with Allen Dulles. I'm open to the possibility. Right. I need to see a little bit more. And the other thing is there's always something that complicates something. So one of David's key things, and which by the way, part of what David did has also been corroborated in one of his other books, actually. That doesn't get nearly enough talk where he's talking about Bobby Kennedy, the brothers, and I think it's called Brothers, some of it gets into Devil's Chessboard. Bobby Kennedy absolutely suspected that there was a conspiracy in his brother's murder and took a lot of COVID behind the scenes measures to investigate. And initially he was blown off of his mental faculties because he was super close with his brother. He may have worried that some of the stuff he put in motion because he was handling stuff hearings. Right. And mob hearings. Also he was put in charge of a lot of monitoring of the CIA's covert operations after Bay of Pigs because JFK really only trust when it came down to I only I have to trust only one person. It was his, his brother. Right.

[Julian]

I don't like that.

[Stu]

Right. And so the problem for Bob is he's wondering if things he was doing because he was doing some off book stuff against Castro, if some of that came back to possibly get his brother. And I'll get to that in a second. It's very interesting. That tends to get overlooked. But the other thing, the thing that really makes me question, wonder with Allen Dulles and this may come up in our King assassination, if you remember the Mississippi burning murders with two Jewish and one black civil rights worker get killed in Mississippi. It's a huge nationwide manhunt.

[Julian]

Didn't become a movie too.

[Stu]

It absolutely did. And by the way, it connects to King assassination. I can explain. Well, you can't rely on the local police to investigate. Of course, we find out the local police were behind it. Right. But there was A massive FBI investigation there, which again, hugely important in the discussion of King assassination. And Bobby didn't trust, I imagine that Hoover was going to do a, a full on job on this thing. So he wanted another person to monitor. And what's strange is Bobby, if he was as suspicious of Allen Dulles as David puts in the book. Well, we have the recordings. Bobby lobbied pretty hard. Did Alan Dulles get be the person who monitors the Mississippi burning investigation? And I am a little bit. Why would he do that?

[Julian]

Oh, I got an idea.

[Stu]

You think it's to get him off of the Warren Commission or something?

[Julian]

No, I, I think they absolutely like he. A lot of things are true about the Kennedys at the same time. Just even look at jfk. When you look at the things he stood for politically as a president and the things he stood up to and the things that he wanted to do and the leadership quality he had and all those things, amazing. Never had a chance to see it all through, but had the potential to be one of the greatest presidents of all time. When you look at JFK outside of the office, he was a very flawed guy. Of course, his brother was also a very flawed guy. The Kennedys are some very flawed people. And I personally strongly believe that, especially back then with guys like Allen Dulles who were getting compromised on people since they were working on fucking New York Law street back in the 1910s. You know, I personally believe that there were some strings pulled back there to keep the brother in check because now the brother also had his, had the head cut off, the dog essentially. And he was just a tail. Tail's dead too.

[Stu]

You know, that's actually what Carlos Marcello supposedly said about, about what had to happen to get rid of Bobby. You had to kill Jack. And I don't know if Marcello was involved, but, and I don't know if he even said that, but supposedly he said that. I tend to agree with you. I just. The other element, and it gets to what you were saying, especially about Jack, he had a social circle like, like he didn't have like people just, you know, find women and bring them to him at the White House. He was, you got to be careful

[Julian]

how you say that now.

[Stu]

Yes, yes, he, he was, he was, he went to, he was in the social scene in Washington D.C. and if you look at the people who were in that scene, and it doesn't mean they were best friends, but they were, you know, almost like frat buddies maybe there's some of the people that people sometimes throw out as potentially being involved in the Kennedy assassination. Des Fitzgerald, who was one of the guys who was kind of running the, the. The last operation against Castro to kill him, he's in books as being like part of like the people who hobnob with Jack when he's kind of sort of maybe womanizing. And that raises a question, because one of the things that comes up in the Kennedy assassination is basically right at the time that JFK is being killed, they're arranging with a Cuban official to kill Castro. That Cuban official, Orlando Cabela, said he would not go through with it unless he got like, direct assurances that the Kennedy family was behind it. Now, I don't know if they ever gave the direct assurances. I know Des Fitzgerald claimed he got it.

[Julian]

Okay, so DEZ was claiming that he

[Stu]

was doing at the very. Quite at the end, he's like, yes. When he. He met. I think he met with Cabell in person. He's like, yeah, Bobby. Again, Kubella was an official in Cuba who had put out feelers and said that he was open to being part of a Castro regime change killing, Castro assassination plot.

[Julian]

How long later did we learn that? Like that.

[Stu]

This, this is very much to your point. Yeah, technically speaking, you can argue late 1960s because some reporters, like Jack Anderson, were hinting on it, but in terms of public consciousness, not until the seventies.

[Julian]

So did Orlando. That was his name.

[Stu]

Rolando.

[Julian]

Rolando. Did he have to. Was this someone who ended up having to escape Cuba?

[Stu]

No. And that's part of why people wonder about what was happening with the Castro situation. My father, very smart man, my late father, may he rest in peace, was very much like me when it came to Kennedy's assassination. I mean, all his heroes were killed. I was basically. I basically spent my life investigating the people who killed his heroes, basically. And Kennedy, number one of all in terms of what he was interested in. He long was on the. Maybe it was the CIA, maybe it was the mafia front. Until he found out about Castro assassination plots. And Rolando Cabela. And one of the things he always said to me was, are you kidding me? If this guy was really trying to kill Fidel Castro, that Castro would let him live.

[Julian]

That's right. That's what I'm wondering.

[Stu]

No chance he would let him go off onto like, home arrest or whatever it is.

[Julian]

There's no trial down there. Like, like if you have a New York Times report come out in 1972 saying you may or may not have met with Kennedy's guy, like to try to overthrow Castro you never heard from again.

[Stu]

So my father's theory. Yes, this is exactly. He besides would say this guy would be dead. And so this is what I think. This is what my father thought happened. Castro was. Kennedy was making overtures to Castro about the possibility of normalizing relations. He was doing it very secretly, and Castro wouldn't have known whether or not to believe it. And he argues, my father argued that Castro used Kubela as a plant to try and feel out whether it was happening. And once he found out that he was really being backstabbed, quite literally in some respects by the Kennedys, that he then turned someone like Lee Harvey Oswald on John Kennedy to kill him. And my father and I got along great. He's like, hugely inspirational to everything I did in my life. The only thing, Only thing we ever had consistently very loud arguments about. And they were loud. They were like, mom, like, I can't go to bed loud. When are you guys going to shut up? Loud was over whether Castro was involved. And he, My dad was the best art. You know, sort of defender of that proposition. But he couldn't answer one question for me because it would go back and forth really quickly like this. I would, I would say Castro's inviting. Would be inviting shore destruction on his own island. It would be a suicide thing to go after Kennedy. In fact, that's a good reason. We could talk about it. Why the case was covered up. My, My, My, my. My dad would say, you need to go back and look at the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody looks at what Khrushchev and Kennedy were doing. Nobody pays attention to what Castro and Che were doing. And Castro and Che were damn near suicidal during the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though it was their island that would get wiped off 100%. They were like, viva la revolution. Go. You know, don't you dare back down to the Americans kind of situation. And my. If they're willing to, you know, he was like. And if they're. And if he thought Kennedy was trying to kill him, he might have said, you know what? I'm gonna die anyway.

[Julian]

So this is another place your dad may actually have a point. Like, we're talking about a raging sociopathic narcissist as Castro was. He did know they were trying to kill him. A bunch Bay of Pigs backfires on him. They try to blow him up with a cigar. They try to kill him through his hooker and all this different shit, and they can't fucking get him. He's feeling like John Gotti. He's the Teflon Don. Like, fuck you. You can't do anything to me, I'm talking with the Soviets too. I'm gonna kill you. Now, I'm not saying I agree with your dad, but it's possible.

[Stu]

And so what? I would go back to my dad with I say, dad, look, point well taken. Here's the problem. He's brazen, but he ain't stupid. He outlived multiple presidents who were trying to get rid of him one way or the other. And why would he gratuitously use someone who leads right to his door? Because Oswald had visited Mexico City and visited the Cuban consulate was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was much more pro Castro at the end of his life on paper than he was pro Soviet. So why would you go ahead and use him when you have. And Castro did this goes to how smart he was. Thoroughly infiltrated the Cuban exile community. He basically knew the Bay of Pigs was going to happen. He had all those guys infiltrated, turned. Yeah, he could have used an exile, shot Kennedy with an exile and blamed the exiles. Why would he use somebody who literally showed up on his doorstep and my father could never answer that one element of the question. And then I think also when you start to get down to the brass tacks, it's pretty clear to me, and I think to a lot of people that the main objective of the Kennedy assassination was to frame Castro and get an invasion of Cuba. And that the. Because they did too good of a job of it. A whole other set of government officials were like, we're not going to have World War Three over this thing. We're going to cover this up. And we actually have.

[Julian]

Can you explain what you mean there?

[Stu]

So, and I'll use an example. So we have the recorded conversations of Lyndon Johnson. We have what he's saying to people like Richard Russell. And we have a pretty good idea of what he said through proxy to Earl Warren to get them to join the Warren Commission. And what he was saying was, look, there are some things here that look like they may lead to Castro or the Soviets. And if that gets out, we'll have 100 million people dead within an hour. You don't wanna join the Warren Commission. You don't wanna have anything to do with this. You served in your country in multiple capacities. You need to be a patriot again. You need to join. And if you look at even internal documents, that was absolutely a factor.

[Julian]

What if that was Stu. Holy shit, man. What if that was the plan all along?

[Stu]

I don't think it was. So. So I'm with Peter Dale Scott. Peter Dale Scott's God bless him is in his 90s. He's still fully functional. The all time one of the lead lead researchers since 1963. Who is it?

[Julian]

Peter Dale Scott.

[Stu]

Professor Peter Dale Scott.

[Julian]

Pull him up. Let's give him some love.

[Stu]

Yes. And one of the nicest human beings you'll ever interact.

[Julian]

He's been looking at this since it happened.

[Stu]

Yes. And he's like, like if you want to look at like high. I hope you're wrong. He had if you want to look like high IQ people. This guy has the most sophisticated understanding probably of like the meta fact. I don't know if I always agree with it but he basically was talking about deep state and really something he called deep politics.

[Julian]

I'm looking at the book titles, Dude's Fire, Cocaine Politics, the American Deep state. What's that one? The road to the road to 9 11.

[Stu]

And. And he frames it all in this, in this capacity of deep politics. And what Peter Dale Scott does is he talks about basically the two conspiracies. The first conspiracy is the one that actually killed Kennedy. The second one is to cover it up. My father often would talk similar types of things too.

[Julian]

That's what Joseph Scott Morgan says too.

[Stu]

Yes. And again, how do you get those doctors to Joseph Scott Morgan? How do you get the doctors in the lab to keep quiet? You tell them, okay, you want to, you want to be, you know, Mr. Whistleblower man and come out with the full autopsy report. Then you tell me where the nearest bomb shelter is because that's where you're going to have to go when this lands on the doors of the Soviets. And we don't have direct evidence of that, but we have a lot of evidence that it happened with. That it was operational with a lot of people in their minds.

[Julian]

I want to stay with this because you're blowing my mind with this because this is like now 60 chess. But we had. So Joseph's been on my show but I've saw it. One of my favorite guys he was on shortly after you. I saw it's 170 and 171 and it was funny because you talk about you've been looking at these cases since you were 12, which is cool. He's the same way because he's from New Orleans. So he came here. You went to school down there?

[Stu]

Yeah, I went to Tulane.

[Julian]

Oh, awesome. All right. So you're, you know the neighborhood but he, he came here with a fucking binder. I saw it for those episodes that was like Yay thick. And he looked like he was about to spew his. I, I was worried he was going to tell me he was like dying of cancer or something because it looked like a last testimony and he just fucking laid it out there for almost four and a half hours and his whole thing. Because for people who don't know, Joseph Scott Morgan is a medical death investigator legend, wrote the greatest book of all time on it. He's on every TV channel anytime someone's murdered. Which sounds dark but he's a great guy and you know he basically laid out from the moment of the shot every single step that happened. Everyone who was involved took you into all the rooms, all the evidence we have of it and it is fucking sinister when you see how much the powerful people you're talking about like Pentagon related, like the Curtis LeMay's of the world were basically maybe for the reasons you're bringing up right now. This is why, this is interesting to me and I'm bringing it up like they were, they were basically mafia donning all the people around it starting with the doctors themselves conducting the autopsy.

[Stu]

Yeah, they were telling them not to do very basic procedures with a cigar in their mouth. Right. And I mean those guys shouldn't have been doing the autopsy. No, like you like Cyril Wecht, late Cyril Wecht, I say he's on like the Mount Rushmore of I don't give a. Right. And I say that with, with huge respect. Right. Did he took on the American government in the Kennedy assassination? The NFL with concussions. He just did not give. Yeah but he, so he was waiting in an airport and he was like president of like the like Forensic Pathology association of America. There were a lot of people like him ready to do it. It probably should have been done in Dallas. Dr. Rose was a very good pathologist. It gets done in, in Bethesda Naval Hospital with the two lead people had basically very little to no experience. The third guy was a wound ballistics guy by the way. Shows up for rfk. Yeah, that one I never fully understood either. He was, they really were and they were being told like oh no, you're not going to dissect the wound. You're not. Now there's the problem with Kennedy assassination. Jfk much more than any other crime I've ever investigated. Including mlk, including RFK by wide margin. And people always ask me why haven't you written about a book about JFK? You've been on that like 20 long, 20 years more. I'm like because I can't make Sense of all of it. And one of the big reasons why is there's like seven reasons on so many levels for there to be a cover up where it's not consciousness of guilt. It is wanting to avoid World War 3. It is wanting to protect sensitive operations. It is wanting to cover up your negligence and incompetence. It is wanting to cover up you maybe again, I've long thought that certain people who had information, and we're talking more at the local level in New Orleans were gay and didn't want to have to tell you how they got that information, right? And because of all of that, you can't do what you do in other cases and say, well, this guy, you know, burnt his clothes. He must be guilty, right? Because the guy might be burning his clothes in this case metaphorically because he doesn't want to start World War Three. And especially if they think Kennedy kind of had it coming, then they would, then they're not going to say we need to know the truth versus 100 million lives.

[Julian]

The biggest problem, and there's a point that needs to be made there, but even before we get there, the biggest problem with, with Kennedy, like the case itself and looking at it, is fucking. Everyone hated this guy, correct? Perhaps with the exception of Khrushchev, who might have only disliked him rather than hated him, because at least he was talking to him. He was like, well, that's a fucking change. Everyone else around the world was like, fuck this guy. We don't like him. People in the underworld, criminal organizations, governments, you name it, our own government. You talk to the Cuban nationals who were in CIA, you talked to that like Danny talked to Felix Rodriguez down, who's, who's still alive. You know, longtime CIA guy, was born in Cuba. They, they view Kennedy as a traitor, which, which I think is ridiculous by the way. But you know, they're Cubans and they're very, very upset about Castro. I get it. And so they're upset about the Bay of Pigs. But the other thing you're saying, Stu, is you're talking about a potential 60 cover up here to where they're like, oh my God, if it gets out that cub. As a result the Soviets are involved, boom, World War 3 HAP is happening and a hundred million people die. My only issue with that theory is that we know for a fact, I cite this all the time on the show, that during this time period there were high level people in the Pentagon and in CIA and in these various bureaucracies who legitimately would openly talk about the conflict with the Soviets in this way in that they would say things like, well if they nuked us we would lose 60 but then, then we'd hit him back and they'd lose 240 and we'd win by 180. They're talking about millions of lives.

[Stu]

I know that I say that all the time to people too. I said that to my students when I taught history and modern American history. I used to point it out to them all the time. When we did missile crisis like we'd watch 13 Days. I'm like, you think this is fiction? It's pretty close to the truth folks. Curtis LeMay was freaking nuts out of his mind, out of his freaking gourd. Um, and JFK knew it. But now you gotta divide things up, right? Um, there are people who wanted the war, right? But there are also a lot of people who knew maybe that if you start opening up things on the Kennedy assassination, in fact, I mean Curtis LeMay is on the list for people. Uh huh, right. That it could go back to them. Right? So it's convenient for them to potentially get, get in on the COVID up if they see it's falling apart in other places. In other words, if they wanted to, if they wanted to get an invasion of Cuba and they see that the FBI is, is with Lyndon Johnson on We got to avoid World War Three. And I think they very clearly were, you may not get your let's Cuba did it, let's invade Cuba outcome. What you might get if you, if you don't shut things down is people starting to ask questions about what you were up to on November 22nd. By the way, Curtis LeMay. I've heard four different things about what he was up to.

[Julian]

What have you heard?

[Stu]

He was on, he was hunting in Canada, he was on a plane somewhere. He was actually at the autopsy. We can't pin it down with him now. I don't know if he was involved. I'll tell you this, it's funny you mentioned that name, I probably shouldn't say. I don't even know if I should. Let's just put it this way. If there were amongst a handful of people and I don't know if they were involved, that I could put under some machine and find out everything they knew. Probably not just about this, about a lot of things. Felix Rodriguez would be on the very top of my list.

[Julian]

I agree with you.

[Stu]

He would be top three for me. And not just this. I'd have a five hour podcast of truth telling with that guy. If I Could get him to. If I could get. If I could dose him up with sodium pentothal.

[Julian]

Yeah, yeah. While we're talking here, can you by any chance pull up the Danny Jones, Felix Rodriguez. Sit down. From like a year and a half ago he went to. He had to go see him because he's very old now.

[Stu]

But that's the reason why I was willing to say it.

[Julian]

Search the transcript for Kiki Camarena.

[Stu]

Absolutely. That's one of the things I would ask him about.

[Julian]

Yeah, search that and then if you find that in a minute. But so go to more on the description and then go down a little more. A little more see transcript and just do a fun.

[Danny]

Next.

[Julian]

But yeah, so I don't. The. The issue I have with the COVID up being executed in the manner you're talking about where, where they, where they decide they're like, oh my God, we got to cover this up. And they basically make this calculation so fast, is that the calculation was made so quickly. The decision to move his body and get it on the blade. This is all happening in a span of hours, minutes, if you will. How would they have known in an era when they didn't have cell phones to text each other at the time to be able to all coordinate on this and be like, yo, bro, this is what we doing, fam. That's it.

[Stu]

Now, I agree with you that there are certain elements of the COVID up that are very difficult to explain from that, from the perspective I'm saying. And I think there was a cover up of by people who were involved in the crime. That one gets very interesting because a person who gets a lot of flack, very friendly guy, he's written books about King and Kennedy assassination, but also Watergate. He gets into a lot of flack because he basically argues that Carlos Marcello was basically the mastermind of every bad thing that ever happened from 1963 to 1976. And he has stuff in his stuff. He has interviews, for instance, with the people that Bobby had those side back, you know, vest pocket operations with. He. He presented a document which was very interesting. It was a document that was just broad and it was like, what do we do if an American president gets assassinated in a foreign country, right? And they're like, we have to figure. And they're like saying we have to figure out right away the mechanics of what happened in the event that it's something that ties to like a communist or foreign source. So we have to get. We have to control very quickly the body in the autopsy. And that's in documents and that predated Kennedy assassination. That maybe what was happening was they were putting into motion something that they had anticipated would happen in a foreign country that happened in the United, you know, in the United States.

[Julian]

Oh, it's a lot. There's a lot to do with that there.

[Stu]

Yes.

[Julian]

So this is only. This is just over 15 years, you know, 15, 20 years after the creation of CIA.

[Stu]

Correct.

[Julian]

It's also in line with the Red scare of the 50s having just happened. That was continuing into the 60s, let's be honest. And all of these insane now declassified in some cases or still covered up in other cases. Basically compartmentalized or not so compartmentalized projects that organizations like CIA were. Were doing at the time that are. I mean, to say they're a violation of the. Every American principle would be putting it lightly. But you know, who's to say that that's always been the main argument with this. Who's to say that those same people wouldn't have something like this all buttoned up and fucking ready to go?

[Stu]

They were. It was right at the period when the CIA was max into the James Bond crap. Right. Covert operations. We could get all this done and had the least amount of oversight and very famously not talked about. But I'm pretty certain that Talbot talks about this prominently in his book because it involves Allen Dulles, Harry Truman, who was president when the CIA was invented, right after JFK dies. And they were close, Right? Right.

[Julian]

Oh, they were. I didn't know they were.

[Stu]

They were. They were pretty close. Harry Truman writes a. An op ed basically saying the CIA needs to be disbanded or fundamentally reformed.

[Julian]

Can we find that op ed? Yeah, Harry Truman op ed. And DEEP has this. So we'll come back to this camera or anything but Harry Truman op ed, CIA, Kennedy assassination.

[Stu]

Now, he doesn't say it's because of the Kennedy assassination.

[Julian]

Oh.

[Stu]

But a lot of people, A lot of people would assume.

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Julian]

All right, this.

[Stu]

Whoa.

[Julian]

And Tulsi Gabbard put this out in 2023.

[Stu]

Yeah.

[Julian]

But she's not in the room anymore. But that's neither here nor there.

[Stu]

So you want to know what happened after he published it?

[Julian]

Yeah, in a minute. Let me just get what this is. But it's. It's also like kind of crazy that they've kicked her out of the room and she's like the one that's actually standing for some of the anti war stuff. But that's neither here nor there. So. The Washington Post, December 22, 1963. Harry Truman writes Oh, they didn't even say President. Can, can you go back to the title right there? Harry Truman writes limit CIA role to intelligence and then go to the next one. This is one cut out from it. For some time I've been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy making army of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Okay, go back for one second before you respond to this, Stu. Go back to the, the headline. Def. I. I want to point this out. Is that so the other one's a faded screenshot. Is that a little. Is that a screenshot from when he wrote that?

[Stu]

I think it is, but I'm not

[Julian]

100% okay, because it looks awfully clean. I don't know if it is, but maybe people can help me out on this and maybe you can google the, the actual article beef to see if there's another source where we can see it. But if that's the case, Stu, this is obviously pre Internet time. There's fucking three channels on tv. Look how they hid that headline. The headline should be all big font, size 72 or size 144. President Harry Truman on CIA. Instead they call him Har Truman and they make it really small and make the title small. And this is the same paper that's getting a lot of stories. Yeah, look, look, there it is. His. Look how small his name is right there.

[Stu]

I'd be curious.

[Julian]

Limit CIA role to. That's my next question. Limit CIA role to intelligence. And then in size fucking 11 font by Harry S. Truman. No, that's the Washington Post back then. This, this is programming. They're, they're like, yo, we got a lot of sources in CIA. They're not going to like this. President's writing an op ed. Well, there's only.

[Stu]

Stick him on page B6 and put

[Julian]

his name real small like that so it seems like it's just some regular asshole, right?

[Stu]

The fucking former President of the United States.

[Julian]

A month after a guy gets whacked in D.C. while he's in sitting office like, holy shit.

[Stu]

And let me give you two things about this that sometimes don't get. Well, one gets definitely talked about. The other one even here amazes me to say it out loud. It's 1963. We haven't had the Church committee. We haven't had the 1967 revelations by people like Jack Anderson. We don't know. When I say we like the American people, we don't know that the CIA is into all kinds of heavy cloak and dagger operations. Truman obviously does. Right. So like, it's amazing to me that he'd even come out with that when it's not something that's being looked into because in part because Congress is not doing nearly what you would hope they would do in terms of oversight, because that happens later. The second thing is, who do you think paid a visit to Harry Truman right after he wrote that?

[Julian]

Dulles.

[Stu]

Correct.

[Julian]

Come on.

[Stu]

Nope.

[Julian]

He wasn't even back yet.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Stu]

He was not in the CIA.

[Julian]

He wasn't at all.

[Stu]

Correct. And yet he visited. Now, I want to be fair. I mean, the CIA does do stuff we probably don't even know about that is probably advances the security of the United States. But at this time, they were a real sort of crazy type of situation because they were a black box. Even more so than they are now. They were a black box then. I mean, we co authored a book on that with Larry Hancock called Shadow Warfare. And the. And the issue that we kept on coming to is, is it's whenever you look at these secret wars that the CIA fought a lot of at that time, they're all kinds of screwed up, either in the short term or the long term. They don't get looked at. Right. As to why that's why Larry wanted to write the book. Somebody needs to explore why these things keep on getting screwed up. Because the government doesn't do it in a systematic way. We don't learn from it. And they were so high on their own supply from what they did in Guatemala in 1954 that they went nuts trying to do it all over the place. And of course, some people think the same exact people from Guatemala decided to bring it home in 1964.

[Julian]

Refresh me. 1954, Guatemala.

[Stu]

So we cooed a guy named General Jacob Arbenz. And that one, it was masterful.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

All the elements of psyops and on the ground and covert and spying. That one worked really, really well. Those guys go on to handle Cuba and then Vietnam.

[Julian]

Okay, so the Democrat Talbot wrote about this.

[Stu]

There's.

[Julian]

So they did so many overthrows. I'm always like, wait.

[Stu]

But a lot of them are also like overthrows where it was almost by accident, some of them. And the bigger thing is the overthrows. The problem with all these kinds of shadow wars is to make them work, you often have to supply. First off Pretty shady characters, right? But you have to supply them with equipment that no one on earth, right, thinks some villager has access to. So you think you're like. You go in with this pretense of being secret. But if some mountain man has a. Like a howitzer, that ain't coming from anybody but the United States, right, You had to do all kinds of crazy things to try and hide that you have to go through, like, backdoor people and, you know, Libya, what we had several years ago, what happened in the. With the soldiers who died. Not virtually anybody asked the question as to why they went after a. Like a. Like a station many, many miles away from the. The embassy. Because that station was being used to funnel guns that supposedly were from the rebels that you could get off the street, but were from likely our own government. And taking it out of Libya and sending it to rebel groups in the Middle East. That's how you get the plausible deniability that you're actually arming rebel groups in other countries. And maybe those are rebel groups we want to arm. Oftentimes, though, there are rebel groups that,

[Julian]

you know, turn into fucking Al Qaeda

[Stu]

and shit, like Al Qaeda, drug dealers, all sorts of things, right?

[Julian]

This is. This is where my worldview has just been warped a little bit. Because, like, even John Kiriaku, when he was in here, he was talking about someone that he cannot by court order reveal who it is. I knew who it was, though, where he's like, you know, some of this stuff that he used to shut down and be like, nah, no way. Like, they're. Even before the Epstein files and stuff, he realized some of it's real. And one of them is the Trilateral Commission. This woman that he knows, basically. I don't know how his relationship is with her today, obviously, but knew her and had a good relationship at the time, I guess, or a functioning, you know, relationship. She went to this shit. And when I asked him, it was a very predictable answer if you followed this. But when I asked him what were they talking about, he said, arms deals. These people that run in these groups that are from the technocracy, the banking, all the power groups in the world that kind of like are the actual. Holding the peasant raate on the string and all that they fund, they. They use, basically, as best I can see it, are their partners within the intelligence community and then who use the people that work for them, who are the fucking politicians, as we're seeing at this point, to funnel all these weapons between these places, basically like a criminal does money laundering and Involves money laundering too. But a criminal, you know, moves drug product through coffee beans and shit like that.

[Stu]

So I was a width on shadow warfare. My colleague Larry Hancock, who I think written some of the best books on the Kennedy assassination, co wrote the MLK stuff. If you go to shadow warfare and you have to understand that the difference between Larry and I is he's hyper detailed. And I'm trying to get it into a narrative that maybe be more commercially, not even commercially valid, but more people would want to read that book is hyper detailed. And he goes into all of that. He goes into basically he's trying to show people how do we actually set up the apparatus over time some of it evolves. He wants to show the evolution that you can even try to do regime change, shadow wars type of things. When you're kind of trying to hide it from the world, especially during the Cold War, the non aligned countries, you're trying to hide it from the American public. And then there are operational security issues and we. It's like a process. Like there's like all kinds of like just basic like structures. You have to have these like fake banks or legit banks that are sketchy to work with you like bcci, you have to have, you have to have front companies to transport stuff. You often have to look the other way when it comes to things like drug money. Like you're not actually dealing it, but you go in expecting that the people you're dealing with have to fund themselves through other means and you don't care which is not good. And it's all like a little process and it's evolved over time. But yes, it involves like all this infrastructure and at some points very likely you're going to have to get people involved who are respectable and get them into some dirty business. And in fairness to those people, I don't know if we should be. But if in fairness they're being told that you're doing this for your country, you're doing this to help the world, you're doing this to save the world from communism. And they may legitimately believe it and to some extent it may even be true. Like communism was terrible in a lot of places. It's just whether how far you're willing to go to compromise. It's a Trojan horse, correct? How far are you willing to go to compromise your own values? How far are you willing to go to subvert and bypass constitutional norms and procedures, international law? How far are you willing to go to do that? Because once you open that, that door, it opens up the possibility for all sorts of other shady things that aren't at all involved with saving the world from communism.

[Julian]

Listen, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the guy who owns the most paving companies is the. The devil himself.

[Stu]

Yep.

[Julian]

And so a lot of these people who may claim righteously so on the top 1% of what they're actually going to do. Hey, by the way, this place has, you know, an audit dictatorial communist regime that does whatever which everyone could agree. All right, that's bad. The 99 below it that they're really going in there for. That's the evil and that's where. That's where the mask is off now. But can we actually pull back up just so people have context? The coup you mentioned, Stu. So this was the 1954 Guatemala coup d' etat that Talbot, I remember this. He does write about this and is in Chessboard.

[Stu]

So what it was called.

[Julian]

The democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was deposed in a coup d' Etat in 1954 marking the end of the Guatemalan revolution. The coup installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of US backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The coup was precipitated by CIA covert operation codename PV success. The Guatemala Revolution began in 1944 after a popular uprising toppled the military dictatorship of Jorge Obico. Juan Jose Arevalo was elected president in Guatemala's first democratic election. He introduced a minimum wage and near universal suffrage. Aravalo was succeeded in 51 by Arbenz, who instituted land reforms which granted property to landless peasants. The Guatemalan revolution was disliked by the US federal government which was predisposed during the Cold War to see it as a communist. This perception grew after our bends had been elected and formally legalized the communist Guatemalan Party of Labor. The US government feared that Guatemala's example could inspire nationalists wanting social reform throughout Latin America. The United Fruit Company, whose highly profitable business had been. That's always what it is. Have been affected by the softening of exploitive labor practices in Guatemala. Engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the US to overthrow the Guatemalan government. US President Harry Truman authorized Operation PB Fortune to topple our Benson 52, which was a precursor to PB Success. And then Dwight D. Eisenhower, I guess, saw it through. And his staff members, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles had significant links to the United Fruit Company.

[Stu]

Who knew?

[Julian]

Who knew? Through. Through their old law career they had. They were the lawyers for the guys doing all the fucking business. Down there.

[Stu]

Yes. And again I say this particular operation, part of the problem was it's early on in the history of the CIA. This particular operation was actually really good. Like you look at the other ones like if you look at what happened in Iran like it was a bungled job that wound up. That wound up working short term for the interests of the United States. Long term. You get the Iranian Revolution in 1979, that we're still possibly going to war within a couple of weeks over. But the, but this one was super well done and super effective. And by the way, if you, and if you. My Larry's. I do more promotion of Larry's books than I do of the ones we co wrote or my own if you follow his books. And I had a lot to do with the research. You take the people involved in the 1954 operation and you follow those folks, you get to 1963. Those. There's a lot of folks there. I mean some of them recruited new people who were younger. Later on you get into that field including Felix Rodriguez eventually. Right. You're in the territory of the people who again, if I had to put people under Truth Serum 1 by the way, it's crazy. Last I checked, one is still alive at 101. And I'm more suspicious than his name is Charles Jenkins. You talked about Carl Jenkins. Yes. Yeah.

[Julian]

You talked about him a lot in 160.

[Stu]

Yes, yes. And again, I don't know if he was involved. I want to clarify that. This is speculation. My opinion, et cetera. I think he's still alive. I hope somebody who knows him gets to him.

[Julian]

We got the Louisville in there if you want to pay him a visit.

[Stu]

He thinks I'm serious. He's like no, we're not doing that.

[Julian]

He.

[Stu]

I'll tell you some funny stories about thoughts I had about ambush, interviewing people in King assassination. But the, the, the that guy and the people around him and the people in that operation, David Morales, a lot of stuff is coming out about him. They're all on my top. Like you know, if I wouldn't bet on anybody, but if I had to bet on people, they would be my candidates for who I would do at least a grand jury investigation of.

[Julian]

Oh yeah, Deep's got it up here. The full but wow. We got his whole life bio. Carl Elmer Jenkins.

[Stu]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Served as the Chief of the CIA base in Guatemala.

[Stu]

Correct.

[Julian]

Trained the leaders of Brigade 2506, the US backed invasion force that was defeated at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in April 1961. I think that was what Lou Elizondo's dad was a part of. Don't quote me on that. Correct me in the comments, but I feel like that's what it was. According to Jefferson Morley, in his bedroom, Jenkins had a plaque from the brigade commending him for outstanding service beyond the call of duty. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy created a committee special group augmented that was charged with overthrowing Castro's government. The SGA, chaired by RFK included Alan Dulles, later replaced by John McClone, Ural Alexis Johnson McGeorge Bundy, Roswell Gilpatrick, and General Lyman Lemnitzer, who you talked about a lot, and General Maxwell Taylor. Although not officially, members Dean Russ and Robert McNamara also attended meetings. And then this guy was involved. Wow. Operation Manga. So basically in 54, it's like, you know, when Brad Pitt walks in and sees Hugo stickless, he's like, I got not for talent.

[Stu]

We like it.

[Julian]

And then, you know, he's like, you're an amateur. You want to go pro. And they're like, pro is potentially all right, now we're going to whack the President.

[Stu]

Yeah, well, I, again, I don't know but again, if I were to, I could tell you this with, with Jenkins. He got accused Jenkins. The way, the reason, the way Larry and I got involved in researching this guy is there was a researcher who nobody knows about, but he's one of the big time researchers around. He just doesn't look for fame and clout. And it's Malcolm Blunt ran across when this group called the Assassination Records Review Board started investigating the Kennedy assassination. They, he, he came forward as a anonymous witness, said, look, I got involved with this guy, Carl Jenkins in the Iran. In Iran. And I then became in the 70s and then we got involved in Iran Contra. I mean Jenkins is known to be involved in Iran Contra.

[Julian]

What was Jenkins doing in the 70s pre revolution in Iran?

[Stu]

We don't know 100% but probably a pretty good guess is that he was a retired CIA agent working for. Working against the. Working in favor of the Shah and against the Iranian dissidents there. That would be my guess.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

Let's be honest.

[Julian]

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[Stu]

He then gets involved in Iran Contrast. And that's where he meets. He brings on his friend Gene, Gene Wheaton. And Gene Wheaton gets to know this guy in the Iran Contra context. And he gets to know exiles. I think Felix Rodriguez is one of them. And they're all boys like the, the, the. He's not one of the like, he's like a late comer to the frat. They're all like lifelong members of the frat. And the frat is covert operations, like serious paramilitary stuff. Right. And this guy Carl Jenkins, according to Wheaton, he gets loose lipped when he gets very drunk. And Wheaton was living with him, they had become good friends and he was inviting over his boys like Felix Rodriguez again, Saul Wheaton's claims. And then they. One night Carl Jenkins starts talking about operations involving Castro and it starts to become. Well, that's the operation we were going. We started the turn against Kennedy. And Jenkins is a paramilitary trainer. He's the guy who trains people to kill people like Castro. Right.

[Julian]

Did he train Felix?

[Stu]

I think he did. I am not 100% on that, but I'm pretty certain he did.

[Julian]

He trained to have done a good

[Stu]

job and what he did was he. We know he was involved in an operation to kill Castro called operation Pathfinder. Like 62, 63 type of era, maybe 61 that didn't fully materialize. But what was the plan to kill Castro while he was riding in an open jeep on a beach, Varadero beach, in a moving vehicle with a high powered rifle from a distance. Right.

[Julian]

And it didn't work out.

[Stu]

Obviously it was very hard to get to Castro in 1963. He was not an idiot. The one kind of person, I guess we went into this a lot in the last episode. The one kind of person who was getting near to Castro was the propaganda use of Americans who were willing to go and defect to Cuba. He would like meet with you and have you on his radio program. You might stay at his palace or whatever. It was. Right. What was Lee Harvey Oswald in 1960, what was he trying to be a defector into Cuba from? He was visiting Mexico to try and get the documentation and permission so that he could go to Cuba supposedly on the way to Russia. But almost everyone believes allegedly he was going to use it instead to stay in Cuba. And my argument probably worth going to episode 160 is he was actually at that point part of a desperate effort to kill Castro.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

And to your to the point because I'm kind of dovetailing, the reason why you're not going to get to Varadero beach is you've got to get somebody who could get close enough physically to Castro. Well, if you could get Oswald in there, maybe Oswald is the alleged Castro assassin instead of the alleged Kennedy assassin.

[Julian]

God, that would be so. Oh my God.

[Stu]

And by the way, that would freeze the Soviets because he had defected to the Soviets so the Soviets wouldn't be able to come into Cuba because all the Cubans would think that they may. He may have done something to do it. Again I argue this. I don't think Oswald would have done it because I don't think Oswald was fully. I don't think he was inoperative or anything. I think he had his own agenda. I think he was a wannabe James Bond type and I think he thought he could maybe make a name for himself if he went there and then said blew the whistle on it.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

But it didn't happen. Somebody figured out what he was about, decided to set him up for jfk. That's generally my theory. It's a rare one within the community but yeah, to the the wider point, Jenkins is still alive, I believe.

[Julian]

Yeah. So.

[Stu]

And I don't know if he had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination. But again, just like with Felix Rodriguez, I would love to ask them a lot of questions under truth serum.

[Julian]

Yeah. So can you go up so deep has this up Assassination Records Review Board. Over the next few years, several CIA officers who knew about AM slash World Project died. Tony Sforza, David Atlee Phillips, Henry Hexter, Richard Bissell, Ted Shackley, Richard Helms. However, as a result of Malcolm Blunt finding a declassified document from the archives in 2023, it emerged that two key figures in the operation were still alive. It was a letter from Gene Wheaton to the Assassination Records Review Board and included the following. I am faxing you one page of a CV prepared for by a retired CIA officer who was a very close friend of mine in the mid-1980s. Our friendship was so close that I kept a bedroom in his home in Arlington, Virginia, socialized with him and his wife, a high level, active CIA officer like they all are, and was virtually with them 24 hours a day. Through him, I met many of the Bay of Pigs veterans, both Cuban and American. We had many intimate discussions about COVID ops, Kennedy assassination, etc. He was totally in charge of infiltrating, sabotage and assassination teams into Cuba from 1960s onward. From 1960 onward, I had discussions with him and one of his key Cuban agents about obtaining immunity for them if they would come forward about knowledge of involvement in the Kennedy assassination plots. This man's programs included JM Wave, Mongoose, ZR Rifle, among others, operating out of the Miami station. Whoa.

[Stu]

Whoo.

[Julian]

And then we do we. You have this video up of Felix talking about Kiki. Can you. Can you type in Du Camarena? So K is C A M AR There it is. All right, so here. Here we go. Let's. Let's give this some volume and play this. Danny saved us, right, for the end.

[Stu]

I know you're familiar with it, but

[Julian]

there's a documentary out there about the DEA agent in Latin America or in Mexico, and there's people that. In that documentary, they accuse you of being tied to the murder of the DEA agent Kiki Camarena. Yeah, yeah, right away.

[Danny]

Aware of that?

[Julian]

Yeah, I'm aware. What is your. Is your.

[Stu]

What is your response to those people?

[Danny]

I know absolutely. Like, first of all, I can prove where I was during that day, and especially now. I have since I knew that thing was happening. I was taking note to the thing that I do every day. Okay. And now more. In 1993, I started writing everything in detail what I do every day. So you tell me that I did something 1995, September 4th, 3 o' clock in the afternoon. I can't tell you exactly where I was. Who do I met, what I did, what did I eat? Everything. When Kiki Camara. When they claim the day I was supposed to be killing Kiki Camarera, I have a phone call with the White House. That's when they called me that day to tell me that General Gorman wanted to talk to me. And they gave me a phone number to call General Gorman in Panama that day, I had a meeting with Perry Rifkin, the director of Immigration here in Miami, with Pedro Reborrero, the mayor of the city of West Miami. We had three Nicaraguan Contra fighters who have been very badly wounded. One called El Tigrito, he had a bullet through his face. Here all this thing was hanging down. He destroyed his mandibula and half of his thumb, everything. And the other two were paralyzed. And we were able to get through a friend of mine, the Hospital of Recarrey in Cuba, which is now. I guess he owes a letter to irs. He's hiding in Spain. I believe he was going to allow his hospital to attend these people for free. Okay, now, these people had no documentation to travel. They have no passport. So I got the lieutenant colonel from the intelligence colonel from the Honduran Intelligence Service to issue a document like identity document with their picture, high altitude weight and all of this shit in detail. And then I went with Pedro to see per Risk and the director of immigration to see will allow to get in that paper, which is not a passport, a humanitarian visa. So I have Dave record with the Vice have me talking to the White House that day and then talking to all of these people going to immigration record. Immigration that I was that day.

[Stu]

What country were you in?

[Julian]

What country were you in? What country were you in that day?

[Danny]

Miami.

[Stu]

Oh, you were in Miami.

[Danny]

We're talking to Perry Rizko, direct immigration here in Miami. And Pedro river was the mayor of the city of West Miami. We both went to see the director of immigration here and he agreed. He agreed to get the visa. And we brought the three kids here. Finally we got the tricky to fly into the United States by Challenger. I know that. And then the second day was supposed to be Mexico. I am at the airport picking up with revolver at the door of the of the plane. The challenge the three wounded people to take it to the hospital. So I have more, more than a record.

[Julian]

Now let's cut it there.

[Danny]

Another thing, the name.

[Stu]

So I have two questions for you. First off, who the heck records every single minute and moment of their lives? Why would you do that? And secondly, did he write it in pencil? That second one?

[Julian]

That's a. That's.

[Stu]

I mean, geez. I race September 4th. I don't know. I mean, I found that pretty convincing. The guy who said that it was the people who were saying it was was him. And that with Kiki Camarena. But I don't know, it couldn't. It may not be. Nonetheless, again, this is one of the most deeply suspicious characters to me. I don't know if he had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination. If I could get Danny in a room to prep him for this guy, I'd probably get four other people to help me. If we had only one chance and we'd see if perhaps we could make. Do some damage on.

[Julian]

Yeah, he's. He's not. Make sure this isn't seen on camera. D. He's not doing so great. So I. I don't know. I asked.

[Stu]

It's funny because, like, I'd ask him, what about Gene Wheaton? What do you remember about. Yeah, what about. And more importantly, what do you remember about Carl Jenkins?

[Julian]

For what it's worth, I. On the issue he's talking about here, Kiki Camarena, the DEA agent who was executed in Mexico in 1986 after being kidnapped by the cartel. And one of the stories goes that allegedly it was Felix Rodriguez undercover in the cartels doing the torturing. And that's what he's denying, meaning eventually killing him. That's what he's denying here. But there was a guy I was going back and forth with on something else who's in the know, if you will, where he sent me. He sent me a picture of Felix, and then I said, he got to be 105 now, right? He left. And then I said, did he whack Kiki or. Nah? And he said, capital N. O. No, I have the proof. North does, too. And I said, oliver. He sends me a picture of him with Oliver North. And then I was like, we gonna talk about this proof on air. And I don't know, we'll see if we end up doing that.

[Stu]

Interesting.

[Julian]

Very, very interesting. About a month ago, when I was going back and forth with him.

[Stu]

Very interesting.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Julian]

That guy, He's. He is interesting.

[Stu]

That's that. I'd love to. Again, I. If you have any way of getting questions to good old Felix, I would love to throw them your way.

[Julian]

Talk to Dan. Danny should do it. I mean, this. This kind of was like the last testament here, but he should really go get a last testament now. I mean, maybe. Maybe he's at that point too, where he's just, you know, just spill some things.

[Stu]

I gotta tell you, the one thing I've always wondered, and it's obviously like a Hail Mary attempt, that if I ever got some of these folks in the room, especially if it was some of these exile types, they not only hate John Kennedy.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

I imagine they absolutely detest the fact that he's now like a national God.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

And if. If. If I ever got in a room and I like John Kennedy, I'd have to BS and be a very good actor. Right. My approach would be to kind of be like, man, I hate the fact that John Kennedy gets gassed up by all these Americans. See? See?

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

Right. It's like. And then just get to a point where like, you know, the guys who shot him, man, and I obviously do not believe this. Please don't clip this. They have to be heroes, man. They gotta be like, I want to gas them up and they're gonna be

[Julian]

like, nice to meet you.

[Stu]

Like, yeah, like when I shot him, you only understood that was a tough shot. You know, Then. Then I would be like, I've always wondered if there are people who are just. Jenkins, right. Jenkins was a guy who saw a bunch of his people killed on boats on the Bay of Pigs. Right. Super anti communist type, like the kind who thought John Kennedy was a communist. Right. I'm sure he despises John Kennedy to this day. If a big. If he had anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, might he want to correct the record along the lines of we did it to save America type of thing? I mean, it's a. It's a fantasy world.

[Julian]

I mean, good luck with that.

[Stu]

Yeah, it's just like, it's Hail Mary stuff that I'm hoping for.

[Julian]

Now I get it, that especially like Cuban nationals who were escaping Castro at the time and to watch their families be killed and stuff like that, of course they're gonna be biased. Of course they hate Castro. Of course they hate communism. Of course they want to see it overthrown. And yes, the Bay of Pigs was obviously extremely poorly executed and had a lot of issues in every direction. But you know, Felix and guys like that, when they call him a trader, when they call Kennedy a traitor to America and like that, I think it's crazy. I think that you have to be able, especially given decades has passed, to step back out and look at the chessboard the way it existed at the time and not how you want to see it. Where Kennedy was way ahead of the curve is he understood that if the United States continued to do practices under cloak and dagger of basically like spy craft, imperialism, they would create for everyone else propaganda around the world to make them seem like the bad guy. And everything we are seeing what he talked about manifest now, in some cases fairly, in other cases unfairly as a result of the shit. That's fairly.

[Stu]

I would say this. I think Kennedy's relationship with COVID activity is complicated. I think on your bigger point, big picture, he definitely got it. The issue becomes with Bay of Pigs, first off, he was misled. And not like minor misled, like unbelievably, like terribly misleading. Remember, people have to understand he inherited Bay of Pigs.

[Julian]

Yep.

[Stu]

And when he inherited it, the people who were the. Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell particularly. They knew that this was a F D UP mission that was likely to fail. They knew that, and they. They told him the opposite. They. They were basically implying it wasn't even going to need air cover. Right. And the problem with air cover is once the operation breaks down, if you come in with air cover, everyone will know it's coming from the United States. That's a violation of international law. The Bay of Pigs was a violation of Internet, all this covert stuff. It's being done covertly because. And to your bigger point, and it's the absolute lesson that we failed to learn in the Cold War, and, yes, we're kind of failing to learn it now, you lose international legitimacy. You make your life much, much more difficult everywhere else. Even if, as we kind of are doing now, you're giving the giant middle finger to international law. Well, you might think it's some kind of idealistic thing, and in some ways it is. We often fall short, right? Especially with the con, with the covert operations. But if you've wholesale abandoned it, you're setting the whole world up to wholesale abandoned it. You're setting up all these countries that you might need a military base in to fly sorties from. You're setting them all up to say, no, to heck with you. You're the bad guy. And Kennedy understood that, I think, as well as anybody of his time. I think he was sometimes willing to play games with covert operations because he wanted to do things and he didn't want to violate international.

[Julian]

Yeah, listen, and this is the thing. These arguments become everything or nothing. The everything side is the Allen Dulles is the nothing side is the people who hate the Allen Dulces that just want to burn it down. Right? Of course there's a place for covert operations, but there's not a place to just be like, well, it's Tuesday. Who are we going to kill? And what dictator are we going to overthrow 100 and put in our own guy? You know, it's not the weighted. And that's the whole argument as we're talking right now with Iran. And I'm probably not gonna put out this podcast for, like, a month, so maybe something already happened there by the time this is recorded. But, like, the question isn't like, hey, is the Ayatollah good? Of course the Ayatollah is not good. It's horrible. Would love to see the Iranian people get their own democratically elected government there. The question here is, do you go in as the big bad United States and fucking do the overthrow and then potentially cause an enormous shitstorm between basically the whole Eastern and Western hemispheres because of it. That's the question. And the mentality of CIA has always been, yeah, we'll do the second one.

[Stu]

Yeah.

[Julian]

No matter what. And it's like time and place, man.

[Stu]

Oh, no, I agree. And I mean, the thing about, I mean, you just. Not to go completely off topic, but, you know, I remember having arguments with people in the faculty lounge about the, the Iran nuclear agreement from, you know, 10 years, the Obama one. And, you know, they, they pointed out this flaw and that fly. And I'm saying to yourself, I'm going to say there's going to be no perfect answer. Right?

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

But if we can get them away from the nuclear weapons, that's in the United States interest. That's ultimately really in Israel's interest too. But they have seven other interests and one of them is us replacing the leader there. And you know what? It's absolutely reasonable for Israel to probably want that to happen from an Israeli perspective. Right, Right. But from the United States perspective, we got one issue. It should really be the one issue in the entire world, even more than AI or, or, you know, environment or anything is, is nuclear proliferation. Because if that gets crazy like it did in the court Cold War, a mistake, an accident can cause a nuclear conflict that kills 90 million people super fast. Right. So we're going to stop them from getting nukes and delay them. We need to make deals with the devil a little bit. Right. And you know what the problem is, is we're writing back to, hey, can you please make that deal with the devil?

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

Or we have to go to war with you.

[Julian]

You got, yeah. And you got to make a good deal, too. You have to make things that actually don't allow back doors and stuff, which I think people's like. I, I had treated Parsing here as great guy, and he was a guy who advised on that a little bit. And he. And I had a great conversation about it. And he was like, well, obviously I was biased towards certain parts of that because I advised on. And I was like, well, I, I didn't like the deal. I thought it was a bad idea. But I understood why, I shouldn't say I understood why Obama did it. I understood the mentality he had. Obama hated Netanyahu. Netanyahu was a pain in his ass. Like he is for every person ever. And unlike every US President who basically just gets on their knees for Netanyahu, Obama was. And this is basically his only decent foreign policy. He was the one president that was like, fuck you, baby. I'm not doing that. And I think he just got so fed up with him that he's like, you know what? I'm going to have my speechwriter write a nuke deal with Iran just to say fuck you. And you can't let your emotions get in the way with that and do something like that. But, but, you know, you're right.

[Interviewer]

It.

[Julian]

Nuclear proliferation is something. It's. It's a. It's a tragedy of the world. It's. It's the one thing, though, that over the last 80 years of the world having it for some reason, through all the dictators and bad politicians and governmental conflicts and wars and stuff that have happened, it. It is the one thing that even the most evil people among us have at least had the presence of mind to be like, all right, don't hit that right now.

[Stu]

Larry Hancock's gonna owe me book royalties. He wrote a book, I think it was called Command and Control. And the whole thing was all the examples and other people have touched on this where it was just accident, pure luck kind of situation, and somebody at the last minute made the right decision that easily could have gone the wrong way. So when it's normal relations, mutually assured destruction works very, very well, at least with two major people or three. Yes, game theory, once we start upping that to nine or ten, now you're playing a little bit more with fire, that somebody's going to maybe make a rash decision. And to Larry's book, you mistake like a bunch of weather balloons for a nuclear launch. And somebody who is rash says, we got to do something. We're in World War Three over an accident. And that happened like a dozen times. Yeah, and that's my worry is the proliferation means you're going to have like eight countries. Any one of them is now going to make a mistake. Instead of three where you could get on the phone and they all have relations with you going back few decades. You're now the new kid on the block who got nukes because you decided to invade a country without them attacking you. Iran, you create the conditions for everybody else to get the nukes.

[Julian]

So, Dave, couple things. First, can you subscribe to My Boy Danny Jones? Let's. Let's hit him with that. Subscribe on your account. Come on now. And then the second thing is, can we pull up. Oh, my God. What video is this? I just blanked out on it. Damn it, I hate when I do that. Oh, I know what it was Jesse Michaels nuclear bomb interview he had on one of these guys who was like the famous story of not hitting the button. No, no, not. Definitely not that one. Jesse Michaels Prevent or Man who prevented Nuke. This should be coming up right away. Go down. The man who saved the world. That's the documentary. I hate how all these shorts infect the.

[Stu]

Yeah, it's all shorts now.

[Julian]

So annoying. Please fix that YouTube. Go to Jesse. Go to. Go to American Alchemy. The channel. That's. That. That's his channel and I'll be able to find it. How? Malm Grin. That's his name. M A M. Type in Jesse Michaels. Malmgren. He's a M A N. He came

[Stu]

forward about the UFO stuff recently too.

[Julian]

Malcolm M A. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Type that.

[Stu]

I hate when this happens. All right, go to Google.

[Julian]

Type in Harold Nuke. Harold like H A R Nuke. I'm sorry people, I got to get this right. H A R O L D. And then. And then type in Malm Grin. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Yes, something like that. That's it. Howard Malm Grin. Now type in that with Jesse Michaels on YouTube. I don't know why that's not coming up on YouTube.

[Stu]

Mal Gren. Right.

[Julian]

But yes, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That for why? Yeah, yeah. The third one. Presidential advisor on YouTube. Right there. Yep. I don't know why Jesse titled it that, but this was the guy. This dude. Can we read the bio? Right there. A 27 year old Harold Malmgren literally saved the world from nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President JFK asked him to buy time for diplomacy by facing off against General Curtis. Bombs away. Lemay Malm Grin, the youngest of the Whiz kids went on to become a presidential advisor not just to jfk, but lbj, Nixon and Ford. He had a personal relationship with Putin and advised every Japanese Prime Minister since tanaka in the 70s. GIS, CARD, Desterling, Pompidou and others. He was assigned to contain Kissinger and worked closely with. Good luck with that. With Howard Baker, George Schultz, Volker and Mondale. Not only to mention Nobel Prize winners Tom Schilling and Sir John Hicks. Unusually, he had all the so called Q clearances. And then. Where's the. God, this is such a Jesse Long bio, bro. Jesus Christ. All right, can you go up deep? Where does. Which one of those talks about him stopping the bomb? He's a hero who saved the world more than once. There was more. He held back that he took to his grave. He was an angel amongst devils. Oh, I guess he's, I guess he died.

[Stu]

He just died recently.

[Julian]

Okay. Yeah. Okay, so. Wow. Jesse got this in right under the gun. So he basically like, I don't know where. That's a TLDR bio right there. Yes, but. Love you, Jesse, but let's shorten that up a little bit. But basically like he stopped a nuke from going off where like something like the order came through. And then he was the guy that was like.

[Stu]

And that was during a, like a military crisis. There were many times where it was like, what's the radar showing about? Looks like there's a bunch of missiles that are coming out of China. Oh, we better prepare to launch nukes. And then somebody's like, wait a second, there's nothing happening. That would do, you know, China, you know, or Russia or whatever it is. And then they'd reach and it would be birds or something. It would be something that confused many times where we came very close. And that's always what concerns me about nuclear proliferation. It's not the Mutually Assured destruction because almost everybody is rational in the sense that political scientists describe it. You're self preserving. You operate to preserve yourself and the people around you. That's why, you know, some of the propaganda you hear about other places, they may be like crazy, but they're not suicidal.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

Big difference. Then the, the, the. But that doesn't mean somebody by accident doesn't set forth a series of motions that cause a problem.

[Julian]

But that's, that's true. And I think, actually, I think you. It's a great example with Iran, all the times that they've been punched, they don't respond. They're all talk, no action. And that's, that's a big part of my issue here. It's like they don't, they don't pose a threat to us. And they're, they've been saying that they're a week away from having a nuke for over 30 years, you know, and like Stuxnet, if you read all those reports, Andy Greenberg's written about that in the past and stuff about us literally sitting at the NSA playing whack a mole with them going, oh, watch, we're going to look, we're going to destroy it right now. And they destroy it and all the Iranian scientists flip the fuck out. Like, I just don't. It just feels like the same movie

[Stu]

over and over again and again. There's a counterintuitive notion of the whole thing. You keep on going into countries that haven't attacked you, that can't fight themselves off against you. Venezuela, Iran, Iraq. You're creating a massive incentive for every mid level power to make obtaining a nuke their top priority, because that's the only way they can, they can potentially ward off either the Russia or the United States or China. If you're going to go to a world where like, hey, it's, you know, might makes right, well, the little guy has only one option, right? And it's not an easy option again, and then you're gonna have to spend your entire, you know, surveillance, national security, intelligence operations, trying to figure out where they're doing it, how to stop them. They do it underground. North Korea did it basically under our noses while they were promising us that they weren't. And yes, that dude's a madman. That family's off. Just weird, right? But it was perfectly rational for them. When we start threatening other countries, we put them in the axis of evil and they're evil. Just don't say it out loud. And then invade another country in the axis of evil.

[Julian]

That's the thing, man, you're pointing it out. It's like the hardest thing to do in diplomacy is recognize a truth that's very bad about your enemy and be willing to have a poker face where you say what everyone already knows out loud because that gives them their propaganda to be able to do the very thing that you don't want them to do. And we have too many people to that up.

[Stu]

And, and then you. And of course, when you follow it up by invading one of the three countries that you said is part of that axis, the incentive is huge, by the way, to your point, and again is, I love podcasts because you get a little bit of field here. You know, to your point about Obama, and I might not be as hard as him, as other people, but on foreign policy, there are several things he did that I really have a problem with. I believe Muammar Gaddafi was a piece of human garbage, right? But you know what Muammar Gaddafi was doing? He was promising to not establish a nuclear program and he was following through. And when you then go after him as one of, after having come to an agreement, however semi off books, it is that he won't produce nukes, you won't try and wipe him off the face of the earth, and then you do wipe him off the face of the earth, you once again sent a message to every third, every country who thinks they have the capability of doing it. You need to get a Nuke. Because they'll promise you that they won't do anything about. You know, they'll look the other way. They'll protect you, they'll support you if you don't get a nuke. And then they'll turn and, like, launch missiles at you from 500 miles away and let people beat you to death.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Stu]

And so again, I mean, I'm just my 2 cents especially. I saw Annie. What's her name? I forgot.

[Julian]

Jacobson.

[Stu]

Like, that stuff scares the living. Yeah, bejesus out of me. Right? So, you know, why are we creating a world where that's more likely? You should be doing everything humanly possible to create a world well, that's less likely. And the problem is sometimes that means you have to do deals with the devil. But guess what? We do deals with the devil all the time in Saudi Arabia.

[Julian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Stu]

I mean, it's on almost every account. They're, they, they, they. If you go through, like, Declaration of Independence, like values. Oh, yeah, you, you X out. They don't get the check mark. So it's when it's convenient. Anyway, back to.

[Julian]

Yeah, real quick, Stu. I gotta go to the bathroom, but let's come back and talk about the JFK files that were released and get into mlk.

[Stu]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

All right.

[Julian]

We'll be right back. All right. We are back. This has been fun. I love when we get like, down the rabbit hole with stuff. I wasn't expecting to, but it's.

[Stu]

No, I love it.

[Julian]

It's always. It's always great. But JFK files come out. It was. It was interesting to me on the build up to that that guys like, you know, Mike Pompeo is pretty much always cringe when he opens his mouth. He was even coming out and saying, like, no, no. I was advising the President in the first term that he can't release this because, you know, there's still people alive and intelligence. We got protect. It's like, dude, you're talking about the killing of a United States president. Yes, it was 60 years ago, which it is more the reason to release it. It's like people deserve answers for this, but they end up releasing in the circa area, I want to say, of 80,000 documents or something like that.

[Stu]

Well, even more than that.

[Julian]

Even more.

[Stu]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Now, you went through a lot of this.

[Stu]

What, what.

[Julian]

What's your takeaway from what you've seen?

[Stu]

So the biggest stuff that's, that's come out. I would say it's a lot of gateway stuff that we're in A position where because. And we'll talk with. About her with, with, with King assassination 2. Congresswoman Luna. She may have disagreements politically with her, but I'm with Jeff Morley who I'm about to talk about with it on this issue. You cannot ask for somebody who's more dogged and determined to get stuff. Luna personally. Yeah, she. So just real quick, in my hearing on King assassination files, three quarters of the way through me talking, while I was still needing to talk, she comes out and says, oh yeah, we already initiated the stuff that the big thing you were asking for. If it was not against decorum, I would have jumped out of my seat. And she'll do everything. I understand on the Kennedy assassination front with her, she was like, she is with the King assassination front is. She is incredibly hands on. So what happens is we get stuff like about William Harvey that's tantalizing, but who knows because he was a weird dude, like carried. He had like permission to carry guns around on planes in 1963.

[Julian]

William Harvey?

[Stu]

Yeah. So William Harvey is this sort of weird looking quasi Jabba the Hut looking, big eyed guy who ran some of our most sensitive operations. Most notably before he got removed from his position, he ran, he ran ZR Rifle, which was.

[Julian]

Does look like job at a hut. Yeah, yeah, all right. ZR Rifle. Sorry.

[Stu]

So. So ZR Rifle was like the, the, the official CIA assassination program. He ran that. Weirdly it was within the larger surveillance operations in the United States. Something called Staff D. He ran that too. William Harvey is somebody who a lot of people wonder if he was involved in the Kennedy session. Like he was a hardcore covert operator and he was also a hardcore Bobby Kennedy hater. And to your point about hating John, in almost every instance the same people hated Bobby Moore, he was one of them. Hated Bobby for what reason? So a lot of people don't like Bobby because up to 1965, especially Bobby before like assassination reorients his views of like the world. He's a very black and white guy. He's a very pit bull type of guy. And he's, you know, his brother will like shoot the shit with you, laugh with you. He might not like you, you might not get along, but he'll treat it with humor maybe. And Bobby was not like that at all. And of course John would appoint him to be like, you need to oversee this because I don't trust these people. And Bobby would be the strong arm guy. So every time the CIA was screwing stuff up, Bobby was often the person who was like, no. Even if we Continue doing some of this. You need to clamp down on some of these guys. Harvey was one of the guys. They clamped down on one of the things Harvey did, for instance, using the Mafia to try and kill Castro. Now, you know anything about Bobby Kennedy that did not go over very well with Bobby Kennedy at all. Right. And you know, there's some controversy over the Kennedys and the, in the, and the Castro assassination plots. So some people will say, well, he was just upset about the Mafia being used. We could fight about that and argue about that. But one thing's clear. He was very upset that the Mafia was being used. So Harvey was the guy who did that. Harvey was friends practically with Johnny Roselli. Right. He had a very weird April meeting with Johnny Roselli when he was supposed to be, we think, in Rome. This is the kind of stuff we're getting more information on. And by the way, I should say this really importantly. Even like a conventional biographer, there's like an interview of, by. Of his wife, of Harvey's wife because he's decided a long time ago he was a big time drinker. His wife gets interviewed and you watch it. You're like, did William Harvey kill John Kennedy? Right. Because she certainly seems to express his hatred for him pretty bluntly.

[Julian]

He would have blended in perfectly on the fucking grassy knoll.

[Stu]

Well, you shrub, he would have been the guy obviously to organize it because he does ZR rifle. He has all like the foreign French assassins under his control, except stuff like that. And so Harvey, more mysterious stuff starts coming out in these files that suggest and credit to people like Jeff Morley for finding this stuff that suggests that he was coming over into the United States maybe and involving himself in things over here when at least on the surface we know he's supposed to be in Rome basically in exile because that's how much people like Bobby Kennedy don't like him.

[Julian]

In Rome.

[Stu]

Yes.

[Julian]

Of all places.

[Stu]

Yes.

[Julian]

Which is the central command center of like CIA covert operations in Europe.

[Stu]

It is a big part of Operation Gladio. Right. So he's over there and we're, we need, we've got records that suggest things about where he was and what he was doing, but it's only maybe hinting, but we haven't had the hints. And so now Luna's committee, the task force for declassifying of government secrets that I testified in front of, they're pursuing that. Another thing that Jeff Morley, long time is responsible for is stuff related to a guy named George Joannidis. George Joannidis was involved in like different Kind of Western hemisphere type of operations. He had his hand in different bags, Special affairs staff, amongst other things. But we only found out who he was later on in the 90s when we started looking into who was running a group known as the dre. I think it's in Spanish. Director of Revolutionario Studio until they were like, sounds great, they're revolutionary students. But they were like more, very much more on the revolutionary side than the student side. And they were the kinds of people that were so crazy that Pentagon, CIA was like, can somebody get these guys under control, please? Because we've got other operations and these guys could very well compromise them if they don't get their acts together. They were young, hot headed kids. They also came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. They're also sometimes suspected of taking oddly weird interest in Dallas not long before the Kennedy assassination. And so there's always been questions, for instance, about this fight that Oswald had in New Orleans with people from that group, whether it was staged, whether it was stage managed afterwards, and if it was, were they doing it in any way in connection with intelligence services. And then we found out that Joannidis was managing them. He was like the guy they appointed eventually say, get these folks under control. And he actually did. Interestingly, he did it by diverting them into propaganda operations. So just real quick, I mentioned the fight that Oswald had. It led to a radio debate that made Oswald look pretty darn bad, made his group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, look even worse, like it's connected to the Soviets when they were trying to say they weren't. And was widely distributed after the assassination almost immediately by the dre. So a lot of people wonder, is there something involved with this and the killing of John Kennedy? And then we find out who their handler was, only through dogged efforts and research and interviews from Jeff Morley. And then we find out that the. There's this one gap in his like record, Joanides. And it's like when he was in New Orleans. Funny how that works.

[Julian]

Funny how that works.

[Stu]

Funny how that works. So we're trying to get more information on him. We've been trying in the courts for years to get like, what was he doing in New Orleans? Kind of files. And it's been a fight. But more stuff starts coming out about him, suggestive maybe that he had some connection to assassination type of operations, making him even more interesting. And again, that's like Gateway files, the Mosaic. Okay, can we use these files now to get more? We're finding out stuff about a guy named David Morales. David Morales came into play in the 90s from a book called the Last Investigation by a guy named Guy and Fonzie. Fonzie gets a hold of two of David Morales's closest friends. David Morales had since died. And you know, we know this has been confirmed and we're getting more information like this. He was a back alley operator of back alley operators. And we're talking like the kind of guy who throw people out of helicopters. Back alley operator. Not, not like, you know, Gene. It's like Carl Jenkins was the how do we plot an assassination in a, you know, on a beach guy.

[Julian]

He just dangled their head, right?

[Stu]

Morales was the guy who's like, you know, if, if worse comes worse, I'll do it myself kind of situation. He's a little bit higher up than that. But next to the guys who are actually shooting people in the assassinations, he's that kind of a guy, that kind of an anti communist. And his friends basically say he's another guy who would get drunk and start talking just a bunch of trash and about things, right? That probably he wasn't supposed to be talking trash about. And one of his, one of the guys was a lifelong friend. The other one was only recently brought into his orbit. And that guy happened to be somebody who worked on either Bobby's campaign or John's campaign. But I think it was John's and I'm almost positive it was John's because Morales gets drunk and gets very upset because Morales was one of these guys who saw people die at the Bay of Pigs and his friends captured, et cetera, right? And Morales starts getting into it with this guy, right? And that guy starts defending, you know, the honor of John Kennedy and it goes back and forth. And eventually the guy Morales, you know, says something, he does something that's going to end the conversation, but then he closes it out very drunk. But man, we sure took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we? Yeah, I remember this, right?

[Julian]

Yep.

[Stu]

We know a lot more about Morales, Right. He's looking more suspicious. All of it is in the nature of these guys all look like they're the kinds of guys. Even more like they're the kinds of guys who would have been involved. They seem to be even better on the point of motive, means and opportunity. Can we, can we close the circle? Can we cinch this?

[Julian]

Yeah. It sounds like in guys I've talked to who have really reviewed it, there wasn't a smoking gun that came out in these pages. But the question is, do you think there Was smoke that we haven't. It sounds like you're saying there was smoke previously. Haven't.

[Stu]

I think there's smoke and you'll get people who will fight over it. And you know Jeff Morley, who was a one time reporter for the Washington Post.

[Julian]

Yeah. I talked to him once about coming on the podcast. He was going to do it then ghost.

[Stu]

I'll see what I can do.

[Julian]

All right, let me know.

[Stu]

He does JFK Facts and he's probably been with the people who also are on JFK Facts along with Larry Hancock and a few other people as involved with trying to get files released in the last two or three years. And of course he was a guy who testified to Luna, one of the guys. He was like me, but instead of on MLK for jfk.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

And he gets a lot of flack and I know why people are giving it to him. I think it's very unfair.

[Julian]

Why do they give him.

[Stu]

Well, there's two forms of flack for him. There's the folks who think there was a conspiracy think that like he's this absolute gatekeeper between like the research community and, and Luna. And I don't think he is at all from what I know. What my sense of it is is he has some responsibility. I and I would agree to make sure that the guy who was with me on the elevator with white, with court, with you know, overalls, white paint and grease isn't getting free access to an investigation that can get us files. Right. So there, there are elements within the community. There are also people who are asking for things. I might even be accused of this. I'm a big physical evidence guy in the Kennedy assassination. Can you do something with the physical evidence? There's a degree, maybe you can. But it's also outside of their orbit to some extent. Right. So there's stuff I want to do with King assassination and physical evidence maybe we talk about. But point is he does have some. They and the committee needed somebody who could tell them now this guy's a literal lunatic. And we have them in the Kennedy assassination. Right.

[Julian]

We got a bunch of those.

[Stu]

Yeah. So there's that and then there's the people on the other side who are the anti conspiracy folks and they expect that like they're, they, they straw man what he's doing. They expect that like oh you. And maybe sometimes especially you know, you know, the podcast subtitles. Right, right. Just because the podcast subtitle said Jeff Morley, you know, smoking gun on George Joanides doesn't mean that George Joannidas always says that. Right. No offense to anybody.

[Julian]

No, I know exactly what you're talking about.

[Stu]

Right. And so, so they straw man him and they're like, well, you know, maybe the reason why William Harvey was coming to the United States and was got some kind of special privilege to carry guns with him was that he was himself somewhat of a psychopath and loved to carry guns. Maybe. Right. But Jeff isn't saying, I've, I've decided I figured out who, that Harvey killed him. He's saying this is something suspicious that we need to find out more about. How about where was he going in the United States? Who was he meeting with? And the other thing I think that people ignore when they go after him is they ignore and they've been doing this for years. They ignore that Jeff does what I did with King assassination especially and done some extent with Kennedy, which is documents aren't enough. They don't have a full context.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

And they're people. The way you convey things in writing and everyone in the audience knows with text messages. Right. It's not quite as bad, but things can be misconstrued. Jeff goes to the people who wrote the documents, signed the documents, were in the groups that were referenced in the documents. So when you say Jeff Morley didn't prove that George Johanides was informing the CIA about Lee Harvey Oswald, because that's the implication of he was in New Orleans, he was running a group that interacted with Oswald, and we mysteriously don't have any of his records from that time period. Well, Jeff went to the people in New Orleans and the people in Miami who Joe Anides was writing to and said in these exile groups and even some CIA guys. Is this the kind of thing that, that, that, that George Joannidis would have written about? Yes. Did you tell George Joannidis this stuff because you thought it was important? Yes. It's not in the files. So you can either assume that George Joinedis just completely free, laid down on his job. Maybe they're incompetent people, they're people who are busy. Or you could do what Jeff did and say, this is an open question. Where are the files? Why don't they exist? I don't accept your answers.

[Julian]

Yeah, there. And there's also. This is something like Andy Bustamante, who comes on the show a bunch, probably still works, definitely still works for CIA. You know, he says something sometimes, I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ. And then there's other things he says. I'm like, like, damn it, he might be right about that. And one of the things he said on the JFK thing is he's like, a lot of the documents that would contain anything near a smoking gun either were never created or if they were, they were instantly destroyed back in the 60s.

[Stu]

Funny story, I was mentioning that when I was 17, I went up to the, to the archives when the first file, batch of files started being released. Oh, I was. If you went to any, any person who knew me in high school and college and word associated Kennedy assassination might be the first thing that comes out. Basketball would be up there, generally nerdiness. But Kennedy assassination would be possibly the first thing every single person would say.

[Julian]

Love that about you.

[Stu]

Yes, I didn't care. Like, like, that probably didn't go well for my like, social existence outside of, outside of school. I just didn't care.

[Julian]

I need it. I need a redo of the Charlie from Always Sunny meme with Stu's face on it and then a picture of like Kennedy in the middle of that board just like.

[Stu]

So I, So when I went up there, I was interviewed by the media. Afterwards, I'll tell you a couple of crazy things, but I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which I'll talk about. The person who interviewed me was Daniel Pearl, right. Who is a hero of mine for the. What. Because of what he did. And he's a hero being about me because of what he did, because of what happened to me just before. So I was interviewed on NBC News. You can find it today. Rachel Maddow had it. I could probably send it to you. I was 5, 4, 103 pounds, the skinniest human being alive in the pictures. They bring me out in the hallway and they ask me a question, they ask me, do, do I think there's going to be basically any smoking guns in this material? And I say words to the effect of, you know, any kind of files that would be in. Well, actually I should. Correct. They asked me who do I think did it and what do I, what do I, you know, and whether or not I think the files will expose it. And I said, look, it's, it's all, it's something. There's a degree of speculation involved here, right. If I had to guess, my best bet from what I've read so far is it would be a combination of exiles, CIA and Mafia, maybe some generals on top, not far off of where I still think it probably is. And I said, but in terms of files, anything that was smoking gun would be in a toilet in the 1960s or burnt or shredded, right? You're going to be looking for patterns. You're not going to have actual answer.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Stu]

So what they did on the news was turn it into a half a compound sentence where I just. Where the pre. From the narrator is some people still think there's a massive conspiracy. And I'm saying. And then, and then they give me. I'm talking generals, I'm talking. I'm talking Mafia. I'm talking. Right? It's all of them. But it gets worse than that, right? Because a week later I opened Newsweek for the article on what happened with the release. I'm in the first paragraph or the second and I'm identified as a 21 year old conspiracy freak. I was 17 and I was. And they quote me as saying, not only these other groups, the half a compound sentence, they have me saying that Castro did it with all these other groups.

[Julian]

This is what they do, man.

[Stu]

Which is completely insane, Right. And the person who wrote the piece is somebody who became a pretty prominent journalist. Evan Thomas. I had been in high school journalism for three years. I was freaking out. This was stuff that would have gotten me kicked off of the high school paper. So I wrote the most belligerent letter to the editor. Back when you were writing letter to the editors of all time. And they called me, Evan Thomas called me and apologized to me personally. What had happened was a reporter because I never talked to anybody from Newsweek. I called him the phantom reporter in the thing. A reporter, a cub had been following me around and trying to listen in on my conversations and reported and quoted me as actually giving her that material. Right. And then went on and watched me later that night on NBC and gave me the half a compound sentence. So I was furious. But he agreed if as long as I toned down my letter to put it in the following week in Newsweek admitting. And they admitted they apologized in like the follow up to that letter. Right.

[Julian]

So you sent them like a Dan Gilbert letter and then pulled it back

[Stu]

and more professional, 100% got it. Well, I was so down on the media. And it still, I mean, sticks with me to this day when somebody says I was quoted out of context. I'm a huge sports fan. I tend to believe they might very well have been quoted out of context. Sports people say it all the time. But the, but the thing that saved my opinion on journalism was somebody else interviewed me that day and it was Danny Pearl. I didn't know who he was at the time, right. And Danny Pearl, he gave me the respect that you would give a 28 year old historian, a 40 year old historian in that piece. He didn't ridicule anything. He quoted me accurately. He quoted my nuance. Right. And I love that. That article my grandmother saved right in the Wall Street Journal. But here's the crazy part.

[Julian]

Can you tell people who Daniel Pearl is?

[Stu]

So this is what I'm going to tell you. 2001, I see a picture of a reporter who had gone to Pakistan to investigate potential connections between Al Qaeda, the nuclear program in Pakistan and the government of Pakistan. And he's a reporter who got kidnapped and his name was Daniel Pearl. And I looked at that picture and I'm like, I freaking know that guy. I absolutely know that guy. And I'm like, mom, do you still have the articles that Grandma Sylvia saved? Shaved everything. She's Jewish, Grandma, of course. It's like. So I said. And I went looking through and I'm like, holy crap. Daniel Pearl, the guy who got kidnapped. Now, the tragedy of this story for the people who don't know, Daniel Pearl's basically the first American who gets beheaded by Al Qaeda in public view beheadings to this day, every time he, his birthday comes up on Twitter. And his father, who is one of get some controversy because of Israel, but is one of the grand geniuses of modern epistemology, something called causal inference. Like the world's leading expert on something called causal inference, which is going to reshape AI in all likelihood every single time I tell his father, I try and convey to his father the story and he's liked it before. And I try to say, your son saved my opinion of journalism by treating me with respect when I was a high school journalist and everybody else threw me under the bus so they could support a narrative that's really cool. Yes. So. But sad at the same time. But nonetheless.

[Julian]

Yeah. So we have more basically take away. We have more, but we don't have enough. And Luna's trying to get more out.

[Stu]

Absolutely. And if anybody doesn't, again, Jeff, same way, like if you asked us politically a lot of things we wouldn't get along with Luna about potentially. And people go after Jeff for that and probably have gone after me for that. Right. The big thing is she is a beast on getting material and she's willing to do what it takes. Everyone went after her for going after files from Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, and she got them. And this, I'll tell you another thing that came out in the files that came out from that. And I get. You're worried that they're going to try and use it to try and spread propaganda by reinventing stuff they gave you in 2025. Maybe. But there was no real evidence of that in that file. The people at jfk, Facts got that translated. And the one thing it confirmed to your point earlier, if you know anything about Talbot, I don't know if he put it in Devil's Chessboard. I know he put it in the book about Bobby and Jack Brothers again, I think it's called again, Bobby Kennedy investigated the heck out of this case privately on his own. And one of the things he did because he got people in all different, like he found a source where that he knew could investigate for him who had insider connections. So he had some like ex police guy in Chicago investigate. Sam Giancana.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

He had a reporter friend of his investigate the. The Carlos Marcellos mafia in New Orleans.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

He got a French secret service person to investigate not the people in France, but Dallas oil men. Right. But he got like a diplomat type guy to go over to Russia, try and find out what they knew and assure them eventually. And they assured back. I don't really think you did this. Right. Those files confirm he did that.

[Julian]

I think that's. I think a very relevant possible growing in, I don't know, credibility theory from this is that Bobby Kennedy's death is related to the fact that he actually got the answer and they knew he was going to be president. And if they. And they knew that if he became president, that was going to give him too much power to be able to declassify stuff. And they got him. I mean, I think that's possible.

[Stu]

That is something that many people have said. And this great opportunity here to switch. I don't go there, but it is. That is one of the very common theories. A few reasons I don't go there. The one biggest reason, and I had interviews, I was going to try and do a podcast on RFK's assassination. Lots of things happened like Covid that got in the way of it. Plus not having someone like your friend over here is.

[Julian]

It helps.

[Stu]

It helps a lot. Especially when you're not as tech savvy as I am. I know you did a lot of stuff on your own, but you were capable of doing a lot of stuff on your own. And he's doing probably all sorts of infinitely complicated things that I would not be able to do. So I tried to do a podcast. One of the things that I had on was. Had a professor named David Kaiser who also wrote a book on the Kennedy assassination, Road to Dallas. He was A mafia guy. And he's also mlk, rfk, JFK type of typology. So I had him on. He's a, you know, very well respected historian of 60s. And I asked him, you know, it's a common thought, and it was mine, probably a little bit from my father, although I think my father was a little bit more realistic about it. Was Bobby gonna win? And Kaiser made a very good case. No chance. And it's because a lot of people retroactively forget a few things. He got in late. The primary system is not the primary system we have now.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Stu]

It was just starting out. It still was very much the case that you needed power brokers to make sure that you were going to be elected. So being late meant you already missed out on some of those power brokers. But there's one power broker especially then, not nearly as much now, but still powerful, just not nearly as much that Bobby Kennedy did not have. And in fact, a decent segment again of them kind of sorta disliked him. And that was Labor. And remember who Bobby Kennedy's number one target was for most of his political career? Jimmy Hoffa. Right. So you had the Teamsters, many of whom still love Toffa. Many of them still love Hoffa to this day.

[Julian]

That's actually.

[Stu]

And he's like, if you don't have the early primaries, you don't have the early power brokers. And most importantly, if you don't have labor, there is no chance in the 68 primary you're going to win now maybe 72. And I think that was a very good possibility. I think he would have gone after his, his brother stuff. Of course he was. But even though there are people who say that even if he won, he was. I mean, I think Talbot says this. He was worried enough about the level of power that he thought might have been behind it, that he wasn't gonna be like, let's have a presidential commission and fix this. He was gonna be very sort of coy about it. So that's one big. I don't think he was going to win. I also think that the sort of the, the dovetailing that people tend to do, and they do it with MLK and they do it with jfk. There's the, the, the Holy Trinity, folks. They think, and I don't mean that in terms of those guys weren't worthy of respect. It's not about that. They think that all three people were killed by the National Security State primarily because of Vietnam. And the problem with that, again, is timing and it's especially true of mlk. And I'll get to. But it's even true of rfk, which is. First off, people don't realize that by the time JFK, even Martin Luther King is killed in April 68. But by June, that war has turned the corner in large part against us. It was always kind of against us, but the public finally realizes it because the, the government came to us with essentially the same BS that the military and people were going. And Johnson were going inside, which is, oh, we're, we're winning the heck out of this thing. In some ways we were. We never lost a battle. The problem is, is that the Viet Cong weren't and the North Vietnamese army were not going away. And we knew from the, the Tet Offensive that all the stories that things were going hunky dory and then it's only in the jungle, et cetera, et cetera. All of that was false. People forget Lyndon Johnson had already. And this is the. Describe him as the Michael Jordan of politics. Not in terms of greatness, maybe if you want to talk about domestic, certainly not foreign, but because he was the same literal psycho that Michael Jordan was about losing. Yes, he was. If you ever see a play or a movie, I saw it live all the way. He was really psychotic.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

Like there was something physically wrong. Just like Jordan. Like Jordan would make up shit that never happened as motivation to win games because he couldn't stand losing. So Lyndon Johnson, the ultimate ambitious, cannot lose, bowed out of the presidential race. The position.

[Julian]

Why?

[Stu]

Right. Well, he. We know. I think we know in that case why. And that was Vietnam, which was his baby. Even his own lifelong advisors were like, look, Lyndon went the wrong way. Went the wrong way. And there's no chance. If this keeps on going like it's going, and it looks like it's going to keep on going, you're going to win. You're not going to win this race.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Julian]

You also had like three channels on tv and one of them's the dude who.

[Stu]

Walter Cronkite.

[Julian]

Cronkite. Who's up there, who announced JFK's death, who also went and did the on the ground journalism and was telling people like, yo, this shit's.

[Stu]

Yeah. And he was the most like, this isn't like fake news accusations nowadays. He was unbelievably well respected across the country. Very good point. And so that's the one end of why you wouldn't kill somebody by Vietnam. The real important why you don't kill somebody over Vietnam. And Again, it's even more for King than for rfk. We had had four years of domestic unrest the likes of which we had not had since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

[Julian]

Yeah. Imagine if social media was around back then.

[Stu]

It would have been. I used to ask my father, I'm like, especially when I was doing my books, I'm like, dad, I'm reading the statistics and I'm reading the accounts. It was freaking crazy. Why do you never talk about how freaking crazy it was? And he's like, we had three news channels and I was very new. He was very news oriented. He's like. But we would get local news and, you know, we didn't appreciate how bad it was at the time we were living. Right. Right. We knew it was bad. Especially me. I was like, my father went to civil rights protests. My father went to Vietnam War protests. He didn't know how bad it was. And so you kill Martin Luther King and you kill Bobby. And by the way, this isn't just presentism, me projecting back in time what I know now. The people in the government were legitimately freaking out about the possibility of a real, legitimate revolution inside the United States.

[Julian]

And they had a file. Let's get to that now, because we've been kind of holding it off all day. They had. We've seen this through other types of releases and stuff over the years. J. Edgar Hoover had a jihad against Martin Luther King. Absolutely viewed him as a domestic terrorist. They had files on him. They were spying on him like crazy. And then, you know, the Civil Rights act goes through the 60s, goes on Martin Luther King, imperfect guy, but like, you know, amazing leader and did a lot of incredible things. You know, he gets gunned down in April 1968. And you know the story. You're right. This is one that's so undercovered. And as you testified before Congress about this a few weeks ago, it's like, you know, we look at these other cases where they've released files. There's literally like nothing that's released on the assassination itself. Now for people, which is actually a lot more of us than we realize because we don't talk about it a lot. For people that don't remember the official story as to what happened, can you just lay out what they said went down that day?

[Stu]

So they say, and to some extent, I think some of it is correct. They say on April 4, 1968, the original official version is that escaped prisoner named James O'Rey, for reasons they don't always give clear cut ones, but it's some mixture of wanting fame and racial animus. Decided he would. Having stalked King for weeks, finally sees his opportunity. Takes a rifle he had purchased specifically for that purpose over to a motel like a. It's really a boarding house where right across from where he knew King to be staying. Gets a room, goes to the bathroom, locks himself in there, waits and then shoots King when he comes out to go to dinner. Flees out of the boarding house, gets his. Drops a blanket full of a lot of materials. Some of it's like toiletries, but it's also most notably the gun and binoculars in a green blanket outside of a amusement store, like sells like pinball machines and stuff like that. Gets into his white Mustang and flees and gets through before they can really secure Memphis, Tennessee, which is where this happens. Gets to Atlanta, eventually gets up to Canada, eventually gets out into England, where he is spotted arrested at Heathrow Airport on his way to Africa. And he is then extradited to the United States. He initially pleads guilty, but for some time and especially afterwards, he then spends the rest of his life trying to argue that he was a complete and total dupe set up by a mysterious figure named Raul, who he asserts and many of his lawyers asserted was some sort of representative of the national security state, some intelligence operative. And he got framed and that King was killed. Again, most of them impute it to King's decision to a combination of King's decision to focus his attention on the north, but especially on socioeconomic issues. He was killed in Memphis because he was there in support of a labor protest from sanitation workers and his opposition to the Vietnam War, which he'd always opposed. But by 67, I mean he was. Yeah, he was hardcore, like really hardcore. So that's the official version of. Of what, what happened. The original official version.

[Julian]

Okay, so James Earl Ray, let's start with this. What was it when he went to recant? This because he Sentenced to like 99 years in correct, pled guilty. Sentenced to 99 years in prison. Then suddenly starts telling people like, yo, I didn't do this. What was his explanation for going on to a multi country run immediately following the assassination?

[Stu]

So he argues that while he's in his car getting it fixed at a mechanics place in Memphis, he's listening on the radio and he hears Martin Luther King got shot and where. And he's suddenly everything clicks in his head. I just brought a rifle to a guy, Raul, at a rooming house right across the street. And he was always kind of a shady character.

[Julian]

And why did he say he was bringing the rifle to him.

[Stu]

So Raul didn't really clarify what he was doing and why in James Earl Ray's account. Right. That's part of my problem with James Earl Ray story. Bigger part of my problem with James Earl Ray story is he has Raul. And we could talk more about this puppet mastering him. Fine tune puppet mastering him for months on end to make him look guilty. Right. And he's completely oblivious to this. But this guy is like a master puppeteer. Ray drops off the. I'll give you an example. But there's some. He, according to Ray, when they handled the rifle at first. First, like we're talking back in Birmingham where it was purchased initially, Ray didn't say this. Right? But when it was pointed out to Ray that only his fingerprints are on the gun, Ray said, oh, now I remember. Raul was handling the rifle three weeks before, only with gloves on. Right. So they get back to my story. Sorry to digress.

[Julian]

No, it's good.

[Stu]

Here's my big problem. The puppet master tells you to drop off the rifle and then he tells you, according to Ray's own account, you could just go. Doesn't send him anywhere, doesn't tell him what to do. You could just go, that's gotta be one of the dumbest things some international spy assassin who set somebody up has ever done. Because you are sending this person out. There's a million ways he can have an alibi that you can't control because you just let him walk out after he give you the rifle that you. That and we'll get to this. That you don't even use to kill King with. According to James Earl Ray and his attorneys. Right. And of course wouldn't. So happens 50 years, no one was ever able to confirm Ray's alibi. And that story he told about hearing on the radio, on his. On his radio, that this all happened and he put everything together and decided to flee. There's a problem because we have the internal records of what happened when they investigated his Mustang and the radio was broken.

[Julian]

Is that something that could have been changed after the fact?

[Stu]

Maybe. But you would have had to have gone back into documents, found the right dates and imported it in there. Right. Because they're not saying.

[Julian]

Could they have. Could someone have broken the radio?

[Stu]

Well, no one would have known what his story was for months on end. So you would have had to have retroactively changed reports and backdated them.

[Julian]

Unless he told someone when he went on the run. And then they found that information and they went in and broke it the next day or something like that.

[Stu]

But he, he doesn't, he doesn't claim he did any of that. There's a lot of stuff that people attribute to like nefarious forces with Ray and they don't bother to find out what Ray actually said. So for instance, there is some stuff with his using fake names and fake documentation and everyone jumps to that. It had to have been like CIA that was giving him all this material. They don't know what I know. And what was established through the Canadian Royal Canadian Mountain Police. It was well known that you could get all kinds of fake documentation on your own in Canada. That was a pipeline for criminals to do that. But the bigger issue is Ray never said anybody gave him fake documentation. And what the problem with the people who defend him, including his attorney that came up with this trial that I'm talking about, they'll say, oh, he must be lying to protect people. That's all well and good, except for one problem. He ain't doing it to protect the government. Because every attorney he ever had, every book he ever wrote or co wrote, he accused the government, every TV interview of the national security state or the government or the CIA of killing King. Why would he protect them? So I don't dispute that there are instances where he might be protecting people. I think there's probably a number of them. But it ain't the government he's protecting.

[Julian]

Yeah, you're talking about a guy also with a extremely checkered past who was in and out of prison for a bunch of crimes. He escaped from prison at one point too, and was on the run. Was he still technically on the run when he shot?

[Stu]

100%. Yeah.

[Julian]

So he had escaped from prison like a year before the assassination. And the, and this is where I'm taking a big leap in saying this, but I gotta at least throw it out. There is like, is there anything we can find that could point to this? When you're talking about a dude who was a repeat offender for a bunch of crimes and in and out of prison and the years that this is happening in the 50s and 60s when we have documented records of those being the very types of people that like CIA would target for MK Ultra experiments, is there anything that we found that could possibly paint a picture that ties those types of experiments to him?

[Stu]

I think it's a big reach. We could talk about Sirhan Sirhan. It's. I don't think it even happened with Sirhan, but there's a much better case with Sirhan. The only thing you can find is that in the last couple of months, he started seeing a guy who was encouraging a therapist for anxiety, I think related issues, who was encouraging him to do self hypnosis. But that was a common thing to encourage people to do at that time. And that kind of. With those kind of conditions, people have tried. I have never seen a single. I don't even think people assert. Right. Because they're not claiming that he was a Manchurian Candidate. They're claiming the people who defend him, that he provided a weapon again, that wasn't even used. That's also the other thing that makes no sense about their story. Right.

[Julian]

Right.

[Stu]

You go through all this effort to get his prints on a rifle. Now, it was a game master 30 06. And just a quick aside for all those folks who have done podcasts claiming that Shirley Kirk could not have been killed with a.30 06 rifle because if it shot him in the neck or throat or jaw area, it would have all but blown his head off. Most cases, probably the case. But guess what? Same exact thing happened to Martin Luther King.

[Julian]

Now that's interesting.

[Stu]

Right? And it was the same very same thing kind of thing that they say happened with Charlie Kirk, which is a bullet deflected and went in an awkward angle down into the body, caused a lot of damage to King, but didn't exit his body. It was still in his body when he was autopsied.

[Julian]

Interesting.

[Stu]

And the Game Master, I talked to old school hunters, they're like, yeah, like, I mean, short of like somebody giving you like a military sniper rifle, the Game Master was dope, like for a hunting rifle back in, in 1960s. Like he, here's the key. He, when he bought the gun, he bought a pretty shoddy weapon at first. Then he brought it back, which is another mysterious evidence of conspiracy because he didn't really know guns that much. He brought it back and said somebody told him that the previous weapon wasn't good enough and he needed to exchange. And he exchanged it for a much more expensive Game Master. Ray is the cheapest human being known to man, loves money and is super cheap. He would never do that voluntarily on his own. And so the Game Master was more than capable of doing what was eventually becomes the King assassination. So you're telling me that he brings you a perfectly capable rifle with his fingerprints on it, but you're also telling me that they decided, nah, we're not going to shoot with the rifle from the room he brought it to and was seen. We're going to go down to the bushes and use a completely different weapon and shoot him. And we're going to let him wander off to wherever he wanted to be and he maybe get an alibi, like a receipt or something. Tough luck for him. He didn't have one. Right. It doesn't make sense to me, in fact. And we could talk about if we want to. I don't think that shooting happened the way even the conspirators wanted it to happen. I don't think they wanted way it

[Julian]

sounds like, you don't believe anybody's story on this across the spectrum and you're somewhere else with it, because that's what I was going to ask next. You obviously don't believe what we were told.

[Stu]

Correct.

[Julian]

So let's start with this. What's the first thing that leads you to believe? It's not what we were told.

[Stu]

Motive is a huge one. Motive is probably number one. So contrary to people who attack me without, I think, reading my book online, we don't argue that Ray did it for racial animus. He may have had some racial animus. He grew up in the segregated south with an uncle who was a virtual Nazi, right. And that was his. One of his mentors. But this. He was not like in the Ku Klux Klan or anything. And he never had committed any crime that we know of related to racism. The one thing that defines Ray's life is he would do virtually anything for money. The more the better. Plus he's cheap, so he wants more. He the government's view that he would have done it out of racial animus or to get famous. If you do it to get famous. This goes for Oswald, too. You admit you did it. Like, who the heck does something? And by the way, virtually every other political assassin we ever had who did it for things like fame or politics admitted they did it, right? So he doesn't admit he does it. So what would explain it? Money would explain it. And money comes up when we go into detail, if we go into detail about our own theory and Congress, when they concluded that he. That he in the late 1970s, that he did it for money, that there was a bounty on King's life.

[Julian]

So that's my next question. What is your theory laid out? And who do you think is paying? It sounds like who do you think is paying said money?

[Stu]

So there's a little bit of wider context we can go into. But please, the. If I were to give the shorthand version, it is some sort of segregationist racist. Money was given to the most violent Klan group in the United States. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who had tried to kill King multiple times since they were formed in the mid-1960s. And because the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi were under very heavy federal scrutiny by 1967 and 1968, they outsourced a bounty to criminals, especially like criminals who were known professional hitmen type of criminals, circulated it through things like the American prison system.

[Julian]

All right, you lost me there.

[Stu]

So they were not just the American prison. So they got. And I could go into detail as to why I specifically believe this. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were being not just investigated. For the first time ever, they were starting to go to prison. Now everybody who criticizes me will say, see, that's exactly why they would never do the King assassination. Except they chose those two years to launch one of their biggest waves of anti Jewish and racist violence in their history. They did it by using outsiders. Right? Now this was. Now in this case, it was racist outsiders, right? But people who nobody knew. They put a elementary school teacher, a female, which Klan never does, was an active terrorist for them. And of course, for months the FBI had no freaking clue who was doing this violence because they had the Klan under constant surveillance in Mississippi. And yet synagogues were getting firebombed, there was drive by shootings, black churches were getting burnt down. Like, what's the deal? And that figures very heavily in my theory. They were. The guy who ran that Klan was a guy named Samuel Holloway Bowers, Sam Bowers. He was the grand wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. He was a psycho. He was arguably one of the worst racists we've had, which says a lot. He deliberately turned that clan into the most violent clan in America. And that's not me saying it, the FBI said it. And he was also a religious zealot. And this is something people don't get. There had been a theology that had been growing since the 1940s. It was not. It becomes incredibly powerful by the. And influential by the 1980s. People don't even realize that it was active in the 1960s. And I have to be careful because people, everybody gets this wrong, including Elon Musk. Yes, it's called Christian identity. It does not mean people who identify as Christians, they gave themselves the name Christian identity. They like even fight with each other over who came up with the name. But the biggest thing to point out is they absolutely pervert Christianity to a point that it would be unrecognizable to Virtually anyone. Right. Like ridiculous. Like stuff that's so bad that when I showed the text to high school students who had never touched a sacred text of any kind, they debunked it within 20 minutes. Yeah. That's how obviously wrong they are about the book of Genesis. But they believe that Jews are the literal offspring of Satan, that blacks and people of color are mud people, subhuman beasts of the field, or descendants of such. And that Jews use demonic Jews use these subhuman people of color in a multi thousand year, two thousand year conspiracy against the true chosen people, white Europeans. And that it's. They're literally imposters when they call themselves the chosen people and call themselves Jews and that their goal is. Or their prediction. And then their goal is that the country in the book of Rev. This is their book of Revelations. The battle of Armageddon, the final battle is going to be a holy genocidal race war that white people will emerge victorious in. Similar to Manson, by the way. And they believed, and this is a religion that was started right around the end of World War II. It had some earlier history to it. They believed that or a subset of them believed that we were in the end times since 1960. And it was their responsibility to accelerate things. They would be accelerated, we call it nowadays. People call this kind of idea accelerationism. Right. They were some of the first accelerationists. Nobody used the term at the time. Sam Bowers was one of those people, the grand wizard of the night, nights of cooks. And he was not like Robert Shelton at the time, who was the head of the United Klans of America in Alabama. Those folks were reactionary. They were like, oh, you're gonna try and integrate our schools? We'll blow up your church. Right? You're gonna try and get a right to vote. We'll burn a cross on your lawn. There was some of that with the White Knights because the rank and file people, the vast majority of the rank and file members were that kind of a racist. Right? Not Sam Bowers. And not by the time the late 60s show up, a number of the leaders in his group, they were proactive. They were trying to do things to pour gasoline on the fire every time they could do it. And although they were not networked in any kind of direct or official way, like this is 1960s technology. We can't have a group chat right across, you know, grand wizards across the country, they had conferences, which is crazy, but they did not openly communicate with each other. But by the late 1960s, this was a small cadre But a very influential people in different groups networked across the country, including in the Southeast, where I think the money came from. They took it to the guy who had the best track record possible on doing violence, including assassinating people like Medgar Evers, and said to him, it's time we get King. Why? Because of exactly what I was telling you before. Unlike the government that was sitting there scared to death that the wrong match would send us into a flat out revolution. And remember, after King gets shot, we had two weeks of that. That was wild, right? These folks are sitting there saying, and we've never had a better time. This is God's prophecy, right? We are getting dozens of massive urban riots and really intense militant black folks where we still have our own legacy of militant white folks going around. We just gotta get rid of the one guy, the one guy who's preaching non violence.

[Julian]

That easy.

[Stu]

They think that's. Exactly. And by the way, I'm not making that up. That's in materials. They know that if you get rid of King, you're going to get violence. And they, and they know it by experience because even when they failed, they created race riots in places that never had a race riot ever. Imagine what happens when you succeed, right?

[Julian]

Where's the FBI in all this? So the FBI, like if they had their druthers, Fedgar Hoover had his. If J. Edgar Hoover had his druthers, Martin Luther King wouldn't be breathing, right?

[Stu]

So this gets a little bit complicated. One thing I could tell you, and it's a prime feature of my book and it's, you know, we have a clip, they were told in 1967, there was a guy, his name is Donald Nissen, he gets out of, he's. He's fairly career criminal, right? He gets out of prison and he comes to the story, he comes to the FBI and while he's arrested for some minor traffic offense, he asked to speak to the FBI, right? And he's like, I need to talk to you folks. And he says, we have a problem here. When I was in prison, somebody asked me whether or not I would want to participate in a plot, a bounty plot against Martin Luther King, that there was $100,000 being floated around for the King assassination. And you could either help track King, that's going to be very important for discussion of James Leray, or you could be get a much larger share of the money if you actually participate in the killing.

[Julian]

Is that what he's saying in this clip?

[Stu]

I believe if you play it, he's going to Comment on it? Yes, I have. There's two clips. One of them he does. I think it is if you play it.

[Julian]

All right, let's give this a place. This is from an unreleased documentary you're working on. Yes.

[Stu]

Now, how many minutes is this one?

[Julian]

Like six.

[Stu]

Okay, then it should be. Yes,

[Julian]

I'm rolling. Don Nissan interview down a little bit. Yep.

[Interviewer]

Good.

[Stu]

Thirteen, I think.

[Julian]

Is he alive?

[Stu]

No, he passed just a couple years ago. Would you identify yourself for the.

[Interviewer]

My name is Donald Nissan. I met a lot of people. Carbon hill, Alabama. I'm 83 years old. And this interview I understand is about my trying to stop the King assassination.

[Stu]

In taking you back to early 1967, where were you? Why? A little bit about the criminal background,

[Interviewer]

I guess I was a lightworld.

[Julian]

Sorry, one second. When you raise your hand, I can see it. Which is fine when you're talking, but you might want to be careful. Right. The directing. That's all right.

[Interviewer]

I was a loud boys prison and I worked in the shoe factory with a man named Leroy McManaman. And he was a Raven anti black. He. He hated black people. And he started talking to me about the King assassination. My King going to be killed. And he knew that I was soon to make parole, was moving to Atlanta, Georgia where I'd worked before. And he approached me and asked me if I would plot King's company. I never said yes, I never said no. And the main reason is Leavenworth was the max security federal prison at that time. Alcatraz was closed before they built the new. And it was not a good place to have an enemy if anybody just didn't like you because it can be very dangerous. I was just non committal. I never said yes, I never said no. And he told me who to contact in Atlanta. He also told me about contacting a lady in Mississippi and if I would participate in this if I really had any trouble in Mississippi to go to her.

[Stu]

And

[Interviewer]

she was putting something in contact with a deputy United States Marsh Marshall, who was supposed to be part of this plan. Again, I didn't commit myself. I left. I made parole. I went to Atlanta, Georgia and I'm working for a company called Americana Corporation which at that time was encyclopedia sales. I'd worked for them before and made good money. I didn't know it at the time that a man named Ayers worked there. And he contacted, contacted me and we weren't really friends, but we knew each other, we talked to each other. I had been there very long and previously I managed for the company. I'D been a troubleshooter for the executive vice president I'd hired and trained. So they had me again training, hiring men working in various areas. And I mentioned I had to go to Jackson, Mississippi. And he asked me would I carry a package up there for him to drop it off. I thought, sure. So I took the package up to a lady who was in real estate business there. And I don't recall her name right this minute, but she owned her own business that operated all of her homes, and that's where I took the package to. And later on found out that in the package was a hundred thousand dollars supposedly for the King assassination.

[Stu]

A couple of things to take a step back a little bit.

[Julian]

All right, go ahead.

[Stu]

So a few things about that. A key thing to think. He says he neither said no, and he neither said yes. And he didn't say no because Leroy McManaman was a tough customer. You're about to get out of prison, you got a month or so. You don't want to get killed before you get out of prison, right, and go on parole. But by not saying no, he still leaves open the possibility or the impression that maybe he's okay with it. And that's very clear if you follow what happened. That's how Leroy McManaman took it, right? That he took it as okay. The guy didn't say no. Let's reach out to him on the outside and see what happened. So he goes to. And you remember, he says he knows he was told about people in to contact. If you go into the report he gave to the FBI and he told all of this, this is very important to your question before, everything he just told you, except the part with errors, because that. That literally happened in time. Later, he told the FBI in the summer of 1967. King is killed in the spring of 1968. And the only problem is he doesn't always have full names, right? And he doesn't always have a clear picture of everything that McManaman is trying to tell them about these folks. He goes to Georgia and this guy Floyd Ayers approaches him, gives him a package. He didn't know it then, but we know it now. Floyd Ayers was sort of a wannabe hanger on for the Ku Klux Klan. He was close to the grand wizard of the oldest Klan at that time in America, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a guy named James Venable, who also had been wanting to kill King for years. And he's exactly the guy you want to give a package of money to, to give to somebody like Nissan, because A, he do it just so that he could say to somebody to. Just so he could kiss up to James Venable, Right. But B, he's so weird. He's a very eccentric character. No one's going to believe what this guy says after something happens, Right? Because all you have to say, and you actually have literal, like mental records. He's deniable, this guy. Not Nissan, but Floyd Ayers, the guy who gives him the package of money. So Don, then take. Don does this, this happens with Don Nissan after he has already told the FBI that he's been offered a bounty. Don doesn't know what's in the package. Don just thinks he's delivering stuff as a favor to somebody. They don't know that he's gone to the FBI. And Don doesn't know that this guy has anything to do with the King assassination, right? So unwittingly he goes and he brings this package to a woman who runs a real estate office in Mississippi. What Don doesn't know and what we're able to find out very clearly is that woman had been, even though she was married on the sly going back to 1964, having an affair with Leroy McManaman, the guy who gave him the bounty. Right. Who offered the bounty to him. And add another quick note on that. That affair started almost definitely when Leroy McManaman, not yet in prison, was over in Mississippi, where he should not have been. He had been on parole having an affair with her. And while his friends in his little criminal clique were part of the first plot the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ever had to try and kill Martin Luther King. So three years later, he's just renewing the plot that didn't fall. That fell through in 1964.

[Julian]

So again, though, where's FBI?

[Stu]

If they are so, they gain. So Don tells him this, right? And the FBI then proceeds. And again, we can talk a little bit, especially later, but certainly now they do a superficial organ investigation. And I'll tell you how bad it is. They, they go to this woman and she. The first thing that they do is they just don't accept the fact that a woman would be somebody the Klan would use in violence. They don't even know that right at that very moment they're chasing a woman they don't know. It's a woman who's going around at night tying little kids shoes in the morning and going around at night as a, as a, as a clan member, bombing stuff and shooting at people. Yeah, the elementary school teacher, right? So, name is Kathy Ainsworth. Dies under a crazy situation. But we'll talk about that potentially later. So Don Nissen tells the FBI, they go. They're like, oh, she's a respectable businesswoman, modestly attractive. We're not going to think that she had anything to do with. They don't ever go to Leroy McManaman, right? The guy who offered the bounty. They go to other people in the prison. Now, when they go to the other people in the prison, they go to Donnison's cellmate. One of the things that Don told them is Leroy McManaman wanted him to recruit his cellmate, who was a machinist who had a specialty in actually making weapons, to see if he could somehow design a gun that could somehow be used in the crime. Well, the. The cellmate confirms, yeah, Don. Don actually did approach me about this. And the cellmate then says, but, you know, I wasn't really close with Don. And Don always talks and talks a lot. Not like necessarily makes stuff up, but. But I don't listen to him. And I can speak to this performance, God bless him, may he rest in peace. You get on a phone conversation with Don Nissen, he's like, me here. He could talk forever, right? So. And he's like, I didn't pay all that much attention. I didn't take it seriously. And that was because bounties on Martin Luther King's life, that happens all the time. I got offered one myself, like, two years ago, before I went into prison here, right? Which is true. If you read the files, people were offering bounties on Martin Luther King left and right. But he confirmed that he was told it. And the FBI still didn't bother to go ask the guy who was accused of.

[Julian]

Because they don't want to. They wouldn't be upset if it happened.

[Stu]

I. That's a distinct possibility. And it becomes sharper afterwards where the investigation, they reinvestigate because that's the other element of this Don Nissen word eventually gets back to. Or we could presuppose the. The folks over in Leavenworth, they want to make $100,000. And Don Nissen's saying, shit, nothing's happened. Nobody's been arrested. The FBI believe the woman outside, et cetera. So they send people to threaten on the outside, to threaten Don Nissan, December of 1967. Don, who's making a great living, has a kid on its way, right? Hasn't gotten into any trouble with the law, suddenly breaks parole and goes on the run. He tells you later on. Why? It's because he was threatened for talking too much. The FBI only finds that out when they start going through the old materials on previous reports of potential attempts on Martin Luther King's life. They find out that somebody who just a year ago reported a bounty on Martin Luther King's life connected to the Ku Klux Klan is nowhere to be found. So they start wondering, wow. So they. They do a follow up investigation. This is even worse. This is one of the worst. One of the. And again, it raises serious questions like. And not even do they want it to happen. It can now be, man, did we really F up by not stopping this when we could have.

[Julian]

Yeah, it sounds like an Epstein after investigation, same vibes.

[Stu]

They go back to the woman and the woman who had denied everything admits that she has some relationship with Mac Madam. And we know it was an affair. She claims that he was an astute real estate man who they wanted. She wanted to go into real estate with. The guy was a lifelong bootlegger. Okay, all right. The other things that she said was. Oh, now that you said it, I remember what it was right there. What? This was all just a big joke. Back in 1964 when he was staying with me because of his real estate prowess, I had said that the Mississippi burning murders happened and they true story, they eventually said correctly that it was the sheriff who was the on the ground mastermind. Sam Bowers. The same guy was the mastermind.

[Julian]

And

[Stu]

I had said, well, given what they know about the sheriff, I joke with Leroy. If we want to make $100,000, all we have to do is ask the sheriff and the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan for money to kill Martin Luther King. And he must have just taken it too seriously. And that's why he told this guy. Right. Several problems with this story. One, Leroy McManaman wasn't living with her in the summer of 1964 when we found out who did the Mississippi burning murders because he was already in prison. Right. That's one problem. Two, at the time he was staying with her, the Mississippi burning murders had not even happened.

[Julian]

That's convenient, right?

[Stu]

The third, and this is the most egregious, the FBI all knew all of this and every agent in Mississippi would have known it. Why? Because at the time they went and interviewed her, just about the only thing that was on their agenda was prosecuting Sam Bowers for the and the police officers and Klansmen involved in the Mississippi burning murders.

[Julian]

So do you believe I'm trying to put this all Together with all the context. Contextual evidence around it. But do you believe James Earl Ray is the one who fired the shots?

[Stu]

So I'll say that my co author and I are slightly different points.

[Julian]

Okay.

[Stu]

Right. He's uncertain. And you absolutely unjustified him being uncertain because the physical evidence which we talk about of the shooting is inconclusive and because, you know, on paper you wouldn't want James o' Ray to be a shooter for sure.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

And then there are some witnesses who say they saw stuff from a bushes in front of the Lorraine Motel, not from in front of the Bessie brewers rooming house, as opposed to the bathroom. I'm more inclined, and this will get me all kinds of flack online when I say it. I'm more inclined to think James Earl Ray literally and figuratively jumped the gun. What I mean by that is if you go further in Nissan's story, what he says, essentially what he told the FBI was there was amount of money that was offered to people who were willing to scout King's movements so that we could more effectively plan out how to kill him. That was a low amount of money, say $10,000. And then there was the remaining like 90. If you want to like shoot at the guy, you're going to get a lot more money from this. Right. So what I think best explains what happened because there's other things, another piece of evidence of conspiracy that I'll get to that's very compelling that suggests things were haphazard. I think James Earl Ray was the guy who was supposed to scout King's movements. Very good evidence on that. And then take a weapon to people in Memphis who were supposed to kill King. Speculation, but. But make sense in light of previous plots in a very public, egregious way. Not just kill King, kill his family, kill people. And that's where they were by 19, 1965 message. They were. There was a plot in 65 where he was supposed to. It was a bounty plot, by the way. He was supposed to go to. With his wife for commencement at her school at. I think it was Yellow Springs College in Ohio and with the family. And like other civil rights leaders, she was going to speak, I think, and the plot was to kill everybody there. Kids, wife, friends. And not just kill everybody there. The next part of my plot, to my point, about genocidal race war and pouring gasoline, then the plot was to use explosives that had been shipped in from Georgia, the Klan in Georgia, and start blowing up the. The, the white, like, you know, like Minute Men organization, blow up The Nation of Islam blow up Black Panthers so that everybody would start thinking that they're all in on this thing in the middle of pre existing violence over King's murder. And you'd have pandemonium that he believed would spread across, they believe would spread across the Internet and get them their race war. Right.

[Julian]

That sounds like a Quentin Tarantino movie.

[Stu]

Right. So that's what Ray was supposed to do. Give somebody who's a professional shooter a weapon and they're just gonna go haywire. And then maybe some clans people in Memphis would start laying, letting off explosives. But Ray is greedy as heck. Ray thinks two steps ahead and woefully never thinks about the third step. He's real good on the first two steps. He escaped from prison twice, but every time he escapes, he has no idea where the heck to go. Who the heck can help him, how the heck to relieve the country, Right? Raisin in Memphis, the newspapers, we know he's read them. Show where King is staying. We know he's read them because his fingerprints are on those. Even those articles. Right? And Ray figures to himself, to heck with this. This is again my speculation. I'm gonna try and get the full 100. I'll get the 10 for stalking him and I'll do the shooting. Why am I gonna let another person get 90 thou? I have the gun, money.

[Interviewer]

Whoa.

[Stu]

Right. So I'm just gonna go over right where he's staying. I don't have it fully plotted out, but I'm willing to sit there and wait on his. And I'm gonna shoot him. It's an easy shot.

[Julian]

So. All right, so other than, how do you explain this? Other than the obvious point of guy gets sentenced to 99 years in prison, will do anything to get out. Why did he go, why was he so gung ho for so many years claiming this?

[Stu]

So. And there's some evidence for this that I'll give you. It's a great question, by the way. So why is he gung ho and why doesn't he say that there was other people? Why does he blame the government and not seemingly do anything to blame the actual people involved? I'm going to give you a few answers. First off, he's in prison, right? And to some extent, even back then. But sure as heck, if you are the one who supposedly killed Martin Luther King, you better have some, and I hate to say it this way, you better have some white supremacist protection in prison now. So he cannot say it was white supremacists. I see, Right. Plus it raises the specter that he's involved. Second thing, he still wants the money. He thinks if he could get out, right, and they clear his name, he'll get the money. He'll get the money and the evidence that he thinks this is possible. There's a couple of pieces, but the one I've always tried to emphasize, look at Ray's choice of attorneys, right? They basically divide into two groups. One of them, and not just attorneys, investigators. One of them are what you would call new left attorneys. They're like the kinds of people who would defend like the Chicago 7 or something like that. Right.

[Julian]

What's his name again?

[Stu]

William Kunstler.

[Julian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stu]

Like these are people who are like one step short. Like one of them, I think worked with Kunstler. Right. They're, they're, they're new left attorneys and they're good. They're people like Mark Lane. Right? Mark Lane's such a good actual attorney that when one of the Warren Commission apologists who wrote the book Case Closed got into trouble for with the law, who had written multiple chapters just reaming Mark Lane for promoting a conspiracy, the first attorney he went to was Mark Lane. Ray had access to Mark Lane before Mark Lane. He had access to Bernard Fenster walled Harvard trained attorney Jim Lasar. His investigator was Harold Weisberg, who's like a God. He's like with Peter Dale Scott, one of the gods of JFK assassination research. And they were all true, and I love them, but they were all true believers in his innocence because of their experience with the Kennedy assassin to all Kennedy assassination. They all think the government killed Kennedy and they now got a second assassin against somebody who they arguably admire even more. Right, Right. So he has them and they're really good, which is why it makes absolutely no sense. And they said it to James Earl Ray at the time, his new left attorneys. Why do you keep on hiring and rehiring more and more flagrantly white supremacist attorneys to be on your team, like they would say to him. Do you understand? And we know they say it to him because we have internal records from Harold Weisberg. Right. Do you understand that everybody thinks you killed him because you're a racist? You've went and hired attorneys whose claims to fame are fighting integration. And two of your. One of your attorneys, the very first one, the most mysterious one, is the attorney for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. That guy doesn't have an office or a phone. All he does is represent the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. And by the way, in 67 and 68 he was losing. Why do you reach out to him now? He couldn't represent Ray. This is something we found in the new files that I didn't know. He couldn't represent Ray because he didn't have any kind of legal certification in Tennessee. And it was a Tennessee case. But he suggested someone name unknown. And then the most, to me, that's, that's a very bad one. Right, because it's like the mafia.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

The only reason you get a guy like that, but perhaps the worst one was a guy named J.B. stoner. Because J.B. stoner wasn't just an attorney. J.B. stoner was an actual bona fide white supremacist terrorist. He was a good attorney who basically every white supremacist went to, but he was also a bomb maker. And he eventually goes to prison way later in life for bomb making. And everybody knows he was involved in a lot more than that. Flagrant racist. So racist. JB Stoner so racist that he got thrown out of the Ku Klux Klan for being too racist and too anti Semitic.

[Julian]

That's hard to do.

[Stu]

And then later he gets associated with the guys who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Those guys had been excommunicated from the Klan in the region because they were hanging out with JB Stoner. And JB Stoner's too hot headed, too violent and too racist. That's J.B. stoner. But the most important thing about J.B. stoner, at least two times he tried to kill Martin Luther King, including for a bounty, Jesus Christ. By the way, where was he on the night Martin Luther King was killed?

[Julian]

Where was he?

[Stu]

Well, we know where the FBI expected him to be. They expected him to be in Memphis because he always followed King around for counter rallies where he would create riots with his co partner, a guy named Connie. Of course, it's got to be his last name. Connie Lynch, a minister in this theology that I'm talking about, by the way, Christian identity. But that's not where he was. He was, he had an alibi. He was with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. And when King got killed, he danced on the streets. Then we know that because the FBI was, had him under constant surveillance because they expected him to go to Memphis and do stuff with King.

[Julian]

What a mess.

[Stu]

And the crazy FBI, whether it's deliberate or not, they dismissed anybody as a suspect. If they weren't literally in Memphis the day of the assassination.

[Julian]

They want an open book, closed book. They got what they wanted. They hate the people that did it, maybe. And I, I would like to give them that credit. I, I hope they, some of them did it. But yeah, there's probably ones that didn't. And they're like, well, well, there's enemy of my enemy is my friend to a large extent.

[Stu]

But there may be a bigger reason.

[Julian]

What's that?

[Stu]

And that bigger reason, and I hinted at it at the congressional hearings, is they may have had a much more intimate knowledge a year later about what was going to happen to Martin Luther

[Julian]

King a year earlier.

[Stu]

No, no, no. So they were told in April. They were told in June of 1967 by Donald Nissen. I'm talking as we get closer to King's actual assassination.

[Julian]

So less than a year later.

[Stu]

Yes. They were getting like real inside. They, I think there's a very good chance they were getting real inside information about what was happening to King. I mean, we're not talking like broad. There's a bounty.

[Julian]

They did the thing that the cop in the town does like that.

[Stu]

Well, we know of two instances where the FBI in 1968 basically were morally responsible. A hundred percent. I would say 100, maybe people would. For two people getting killed who they didn't like. Right.

[Julian]

MLK.

[Stu]

Well, that would be the third. If my, if, if that part of my theory was correct. We've got ones that are much more concrete than mlk, which are familiar with Fred Hampton.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Stu]

So if your people stay.

[Julian]

I was born on the day Fred Hampton died.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Stu]

Well, the thing about, the thing about Fred Hampton, if people, people get close to the story, and it's in the, in the movie Fred Hampton, an FBI informant told the FBI where Fred Hampton was, what allegedly he was going to be doing. Right. And the times of when he would be there. And we know the informant well established. The FBI then gave it to like the SWAT unit for the Chicago pd who had already killed some Black Panthers. And they went in and guns a blazing. Now again, they're told things about what he's supposedly going to be doing. He was sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend. They went in and shot the place up and killed Fred Hampton.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Stu]

Now some people will fight back about it. It's about as rock solid as you get. Right.

[Julian]

Who's the second one?

[Stu]

The second one is much less well known and ties directly to the King assassination. All right, not, not Malcolm x. That was 65. That was three years before. So later, later in 1968, there. Remember I was telling you that the White knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. They had this religious compulsion to do violence. Right, Right. And they were continuing the violence by using outsiders, including that elementary school teacher. Right. Well, FBI was in a state of freaking war with the. With the. With the Klan in Mississippi, like the local Jackson field office. When I say war, the. The Klan had largely been untouchable for years, and the FBI there was basically out to try and put them away for life for the things that they were doing. But the Klan there were brazen, and they. One instance they took. An FBI agent was following them. These guys were masters of CB radio. I remind me of. Tell you about that significance for the king Assassination day. Somebody radioed their boys in the clan, and the boys started following the FBI. Then they forced them off to the side of the road. They pulled out the FBI agents with shotguns fastened on them, and one of the most crazy guys who I've tried to ambush interview in 2013, smacked them across their face.

[Julian]

The FBI?

[Stu]

Yeah. Nothing happened to him. The f. The Klan had the juries rigged in. In. In. In Mississippi. All right, so that's like the least. They had hit lists with FBI agents, names on. They. They went after their homes, right?

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

So they were in absolute war. And there would. Then meanwhile, they were pulling off major waves of violence right underneath their noses. And the FBI had no idea who it was. They called the person who was doing it the man. Well, they got an informant themselves. Fact. Two of the guys who killed the. The people in the Mississippi burning killings they caught, they had two informants who figured out who the man was and what they were up to.

[Julian]

Who was the man?

[Stu]

The man was a guy by the name of Thomas Albert Terrence.

[Julian]

Is this the second guy?

[Stu]

This is not the second guy, although they wanted it to be the second guy. I'll get to that. Terrence had actually been working with a small team of people, all of whom had been identified under this umbrella of that crazy theology of a reverend by the name of Wesley Swift from California. They called them the Swift hit squad. His sort of proxy in Mississippi was Sam Bowers. So it was a team of people. And Terrence typically went out with one particular person. But this night, and maybe there's some suspicion there, this night he went out with that elementary school teacher, Kathy Ainsworth. FBI did something else. They told the Jackson police, and by this time, the Jackson police, it was over between anything with them and the Klan. And they were just as determined to do whatever it took to stop the Klan as they could, because the Klan violence was destroying even the economy. Right. You can't stop these people from bombing the houses of businessmen, of churches, shooting into the homes of black families and, you know, hitting, wounding like 13 year old girls. It had reached ahead. And the FBI knew darn well. Again, this is like largely documented. FBI knew darn well that when Terrence and this woman, this teacher, her name is Kathy Ainsworth, showed up to do another bombing, that the police will be there with guns a blazing. And that's exactly what happened. And they were killed, not both of them. So Terrence survives, Kathy gets killed. And they had no idea that a woman, again, even to this day, they didn't exactly. Until that day, they didn't know who Terrence was. They definitely didn't know who Kathy was. They killed Kathy with Terrence in the car. Terrence gets wounded, he goes to prison. Right. She becomes to this day a martyr for white supremacists. But again, to our original point, I have more respect obviously for Fred Hampton than I do for Tom and Terrence. And.

[Julian]

But you're saying two opposite sides of the coin, where technically, and as much

[Stu]

as I hate the Klan.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Stu]

The FBI and the local police shouldn't be arranging to kill somebody without due process. Habeas corpus in a trial.

[Julian]

Correct.

[Stu]

It's disgusting. But they did it. And so we have two times where they did that. Now, two things. Something to note to the people who think the FBI actually literally shot people, like shot Martin Luther King. We know these two instances, they didn't have even a tactical SWAT team at that time. They do it through proxies, they let it happen, and then you get canceled. So now the question, and I can't confirm it, but it's a valid question. It's a valid question. That's exactly what I said to Congresswoman Luna. I said, I cannot reliably dismiss that possibility. And then I added, and this gets to our point from about 15 minutes ago, that is because it now seems incredibly likely that the FBI had a golden informant inside the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and that he. Very well. And there's some evidence of this and decent evidence was trying to tell them King's about to be shot. And so now you've got. They had a year to stop it from Donald Nissen and they had like weeks to stop it from this informant. And I'll tell you one thing, I said that there's that other guy in the car, Tommy Terrence. And I want to say this because he's still alive. If you Ever want me to. If you ever want to do an interview. I've been trying to get an interview with you, Tommy Terrence, for 15 years. If you actually read my book, I don't say you shot Martin Luther King. I say you might have been the actual original intended patsy. Long story, but I say it to him. But you yourself, Tommy Terrence said that the month before Martin Luther King went killed, you went to California and you got a gun from the guy who is the lead reverend minister of the Christian Identity of Theology. And Tommy Tarrano was in that theology for the purpose of killing King. A guy who had been wanting to kill king for 10 years gave you a rifle, right? Then the next thing that happens is while you're still not known to the FBI as anything other than a one time kid who missed a court hearing for his to get out of a gun charge from 1964, that's the only thing the FBI knows about him in March of 1968. They only find out he's the man three months later. You, in your own autobiography say that you went back to your home after getting that weapon to kill King and you couldn't go home because your home was under around the clock 24 hour surveillance by the FBI. The FBI does not run 24 hour around the clock surveillance for people whose only supposed offense is a gun possession charge from 1964 that they didn't even go to prison for.

[Julian]

What a mess, man.

[Stu]

Right? So you go back there and it gets worse. You then write that, you then wrote a note. And we have it, this is a week before King gets killed, that you're about to launch underground tactical missions against Martin Luther King. Not Martin, sorry, not against Martin Luther. Just underground tactical missions. Right? And then the day, two days after Martin Luther King's assassination, when you're still somebody who nobody knows about in the FBI, you are one of the first, you're in the first batch of six names of people whose photograph was being shown around the gun store where the rifle, the kill King was bought. I can tell you why every other person who was in that lineup, why their picture was shown. I could tell you everyone. There's only one person I can't tell you from the FBI records. Why are they showing his picture? It's Tommy Terrence. Because they didn't know he got a rifle to kill King unless the informant told them.

[Julian]

Right?

[Stu]

That's why there's 24 hour surveillance. That's why they keep showing his picture around when all they, they don't know what he is Right.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Stu]

I actually went to the head FBI guy who was part of what eventually arrested Tommy Terrence, and I sent him, and I should say me and my co author, Larry Hancock, we sent him what at that time was like, our, like, initial evidence book about what we were doing. And we thought this guy was going to tell us to screw off right now. He told us. First off, I have. I cannot. Basically. I'm going to paraphrase. What the heck was the FBI in Alabama doing showing Tommy Tarrant's picture around? He wasn't even on our radar. The next thing he told us is, you must continue your investigation. Tell me. It's crazy.

[Julian]

So keep going.

[Stu]

Keep going.

[Julian]

Well, I got to film some stuff tonight.

[Stu]

Keep on going.

[Julian]

Yes. Otherwise we would keep going. But you wrote a whole book on this with Larry, right?

[Stu]

It's called Killing King. Yes.

[Julian]

All right, we'll have that link down below so people can check that out. But what a fucking mess, man.

[Stu]

Yes.

[Julian]

And there's, like, no files released on it. So maybe now we'll start. Luna and some other people will start getting some files released. That would be cool.

[Stu]

I hope so.

[Julian]

All right, well, thank you as always, for the education, sir. It was a lot of fun.

[Stu]

Thank you.

[Julian]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. What's up, guys? Thanks so much for watching the video. If you have not subscribed, please hit that subscribe button before you leave as well. Well as leaving a like on the video. It's a huge, huge help. You can join my Patreon via the link in the description and you can also join my clipping community via the Discord link down below. See you for the next episode.