September 14, 2025 • 34 mins
Gus Russo’s research into the Kennedy Assassination is second only to The Warren Commission. He’s been to primary sources. He’s seen documents few ever have. And he’s ready to address the question of whether CIA was involved in the assassination. Here’s his answer: No. So why DO people still suspect CIA? And who else WAS involved? He’s got answers to that too. Also, why the government shouldn’t release the JFK files. (ENCORE from Season 4)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
John and I are on break. Now we're on a
secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible episodes
come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring you
one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon be
launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
So today's guest is Gus Russo. He's an investigative reporter
and writer. He's an author of many books on subjects
from JFK to to Fidel Castro, gangsters, the FBI, CIA,
and so, Gus, it's great to have with.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
You with us today.
Speaker 5 (01:14):
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I'm sort of one of these people that has dug
into everything related to mar I wanted to talk you
about RFK Junior is resurrecting a conspiracy theory that the
CIA was behind the murder of President John F.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
And you've written some You've written a lot about this
in fact, and so could you tell us a little
bit about that conspiracy. It's something that just doesn't seem
to die. And Jerry and I get it all the time.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
It's one of the craziest ones because there's no evidence
at all that the CIA did it. It's just total
theory based on pretty much nothing. I lived through it.
I was interested in this case back in the seventies.
I attended the House Select Committee on Assassination's hearings. The
open hearings interviewed a lot of people. My theory about
why they say this is that we all lived through
(01:58):
the Church Committee years and when the Church Committee fingered
the CIA for doing all these plots around the world,
it left an impression on a generation that the CIA
is the source of all evil. And I think we
all might agree that those operations were am entirely the
branch out of the white houses that were around, whether
(02:19):
it's Eisenhower or Kennedy, but a young generation thought that
the CIA masterminded all these plots and coups and everything,
and that stuck with a lot of people, even in
the face of subsequent evidence to the contrary. I do
you really look at it hard. What they go back
to is a phrase that President Kennedy allegedly said after
(02:40):
the Bay Pig. Tom Wicker wrote an article in The
New York Times about the Bay of Pigs and thirty
pages in he put a quotation in there that came
from an anonymous source that heard from another anonymous source.
The President Kennedy said, I'm going to tear the CIA
to a thousand pieces. There's no way to know if
you ever said it, because we have no way of
knowing where it came from. I don't believe he ever
(03:00):
said it, and the people of the intelligence field who
were back and there in those days also say they
have no idea that he ever said it. In fact,
President Kennedy doubled the CIA's budget and ivoy it and
got an internal ci A report of their relationship with
all presidential administrations, and by far the best relationship they
(03:23):
had was with JFK. That's what they said. So that's it.
Based on this quote that Kennedy was going to tear
the CIA into a thousand pieces, which he obviously didn't do,
and that he fired Alan Dulles, who was his CIA
director at the time of the Bay of Pigs. And
he didn't fire Alan Dulles. In reality, all you have
to do is read Dulles's biographies and you'll see that
(03:44):
Dulles offered his resignation after the Bay of Pigs and
Kennedy turned him down. Kennedy said, no, Alan, you're a
friend of the family. We wanted you to stay on
when you wanted to retire. Anyway, you only stayed on
because we begged you to. He didn't want to be there,
and he was saying, come on, let me resign and
you'll look better and I'll be retired. Please stay on.
He offered three times to resign. Finally, in the fall,
(04:07):
four or five months after the Bad Pigs, Kennedy said,
I guess you should go. The heat is getting too much.
But thank you, you've been great. He stayed close friends
with Dallan Dallis, as did Robert Kennedy. We'd have all
the letters back and forth between them. One of the
most telling things is that when LBJ set up the
Warren Commission, it was Robert Kennedy, who pretty much demanded
(04:27):
that Johnson put Dulles on the Warren Commission. He was
like an uncle to the book, to the Kennedy brothers,
and against that, they have this one.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
Alleged quote, if Kennedy was going to rip the CIA
in one thousand pieces, replace it with something else, replace personnel,
as there'd be paperwork involved in that.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Right from Kennedy's.
Speaker 6 (04:46):
Paper, He'd be giving orders, there'd be discussions that would
be in the NSC. So making a simple declarative sentence,
whether he made it or not, doesn't mean he's.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Going to file through.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
And if he was going to follow through, CIA would
know it because they would know through the NSC they'd
be talking about replacements personnel.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
There's no evidence of any of that.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Let me ask you, there are some real conspiracies, and
I think you did some digging in front out. There
actually is a conspiracy around this, and the conspiracy is
that the Soviet intelligence services used money and their influence
to try to push this conspiracy theory.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Is that true?
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Yeah, that's true. Disinformation is certainly real, and I think
what we're going through now, it's my contention that they
perfected disinformation. The Soviets at the time, came up with
the CIA, created ads, The CIA tried to kill the pope.
The CII did everything, but this was their laboratory, the
Kennedy case, and it started immediately after with getting books published,
(05:48):
magazine articles, newspaper articles. They would read our stuff, as
you know, they read our papers and books and find
a way to insert into our own narrative little things
that would seem to make sense. I will agree, I
wouldn't call that a conspiracy. That's just intelligence world.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Well, Russian intelligences conspired to say what can we do
to create a price grotory and put it into their
systems in a way, conspiracy just more than one person
coming up with the plan to do something. And frankly,
Gus there was some connections between the CIA and the
jfk assassination, not in the fact that any CIA people
were involved in it. But as you remember, there was
(06:25):
a Russian, a Soviet defector named Urinasenko who came to
the United States around that time, and he had known
Lee Harvey Oswald. He had seen Lee Harvey Oswald's file
when he worked for the KGB second chief director at
the internal part of it. Sure of course, this created
inside the government a big oh my god, you know
where the Russians involved in the assassination. They've interviewed him,
(06:48):
and they looked at him and they thought that, you know,
there's no way he would because he's a marine and
he defected to the Soviet Union. Therefore, they'd be greatly
interested in him and they would use him as a
potential assassin.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
John lb Jay knew pretty quickly that Russia had nothing
to do with it because NSA was bugging Nikita's dasha
and his other residences and they heard him talking about,
oh my god, how did this happen? This guy lived here?
Oh my god, they're going to think we did it.
And the NSA report that back to Johnson and that
sort of put that away for the government. We knew
(07:19):
Russia didn't have anything to do with it, but Russia
was so concerned that we might think that they sent
Uri over to make sure we knew they had nothing
to do with it. But for me, the fascinating mystery,
I don't want to take conspiracy, but the lasting mystery
of that whole thing is what happened in Mexico with
Oswald hanging with Cubans for about a week. And that
(07:39):
is I've dug up a lot of things there that
make it look like they knew what was going to happen,
that Oswald was going to do this, and that has
never been investigated by the government at all. Warren Commission
didn't look into it. The House Committee spent two days
down there. Our researcher. We hired a detective for a
documentary I did, and we spent he spent about a
(07:59):
year dredging up embassy sources who were there when Oswald
was there for us, and we learned a lot. And
by the way, I interviewed during Nasenko for a documentary
I did with Peter Jennings probably twenty years ago. When
I did a show with Croplind back in ninety three
called Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? It was a big undertaking.
We spent two years traveling the world interviewing. We had
(08:21):
a big budget. Our senior producer, Mike Sullivan, said, let's
find out first if Oswald pulled the trigger, Let's see
who shot him first, and we could work backwards from him.
That's the easiest way to do it. And so we
spent the first few months trying to figure out forensically
ballistically who did it? And it was overwhelming. Oswald fired
all the shots and then it became a lot easier
(08:41):
to see who he was connected to, which was nobody,
and we went We really worked hard, We tried to
do the due diligence, and it just didn't hang up.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Hold up.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
He was the ultimate loaner, no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
I think that's why conspiracies get built up, right, how
is it possible that this absolute loser could impact world history?
And so people have to create stories to fill that void.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
And Lee Harvey Altiswalld had a very powerful gun, that
Carcato rifle. We spoke to all the ballistics people, this
is a gun you did not want to get in
front of. This thing is like a cannon. And he
was good with it. I held his Marine targets in
my hand, and he was a good shooter at two
hundred yards with a bolt action weapon. I can go
with this ballistic stuff forever. But I'd just say that
(09:26):
this was an easy shot. People who say it was
a hard shot, I asked them, where did you hear that?
And they say, I don't know if somebody told me.
When you really look at it, it was a really
easy shot. You only hit twice, two hits in nine
seconds from a target that's moving slowly away from him.
It was nothing anybody could have learned to do that shot.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
In the CIA officers, we're not saying there's no conspiracy,
there's no possibility of it. There are permutations be between
Oswald did it on his own and Oswald was a.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Dupe and a stooge of the Russians of the CIA.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
It certainly possibly he could have mentioned this too while
he was in Mexican talking to the Soviets. A low
level guy would write it up and send it in
in the KGB archives. Or he could have told Cuban
intelligence officers when he's down there, I'm gonna get Kennedy.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
Which does exactly what he said, exactly what.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
So for us, though, it's is their proof, and in
the intelligence world, you don't want to be pretty sure
when the possibility of getting it wrong is nuclear war.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Right.
Speaker 7 (10:27):
When the Warren Report.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
Was written, the concern was that if people really came
to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that it was the
Soviets that did it, they were concerned that there'd be
forty million dead inside it three hours, right, if we
point the finger wrongly and things get out of control.
So today we don't really think about that so much, except,
of course, when we have WMD in Iraq, where agency officers,
(10:53):
analysts who Johnny and I know some of them. They
were pretty darn sure that there was WMD in Iraq, right,
I mean they saidam said he had it.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
There was reporting that it was there.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
He had it in the past, He's threatened to use it,
but we didn't have proof that it was there.
Speaker 7 (11:11):
We just were like pretty sure. And so same for
the Warren Report. Weld onto the second. Well, we take
a quick break.
Speaker 5 (11:31):
And we're back. I've been a few literally thousands of
people on this subject over the years, and what I concluded,
what I learned from them. Johnson feared World War three
was going to break out, and he was terrified of that.
So when the Warren Commission was formed, he instructed the
(11:52):
FBI to not investigate Mexico City. He was afraid of
where it might lead. Yeah, and I'm hanging on my wall.
A letter from the FBI guy who went down to
Mexico City, the only Spanish speaker who could go down
and investigate the Cubans. He went down that night and
he was called in his hotel rooms and he was
told that Johnson had told Hoover to tell him do
(12:13):
not leave your room, don't talk to anybody while the
trail was hot. I just don't want to go there.
He was terrified. Even though he knew that the Kruse
Jef didn't push this thing. He was worried that if
they found that the Castro was behind it, Americans would
demand retaliation against Castro, which would bring the Russians in
like they had a year earlier during the missile crisis,
(12:34):
which was right at the front of Johnson's mind. The
crisis had just happened, so he was worried that Cuba
might have had something to do with this, or was
involved or had knowledge, and he didn't want to go there.
So there was no investigation of Oswald in Mexico. And
another interesting thing, Bobby Kennedy was the one who put Duallas,
his family friend, on the Warren Commission. Dulles knew about
(12:58):
the plots that Robert Kennedy with the CIA were trying
to pull off against Fidel, and Dulles never told the
other commissioners they were dying to know why a pro
Castro guy like Oswald would shoot Kennedy, and Dallas said,
I have no idea, and they looked at him and said,
were we doing anything to piss off Lee? Harvey Oswald
(13:18):
and the Warrenck Commission attorneys that I've interviewed said when
they found out about these plots via the Church Committee,
they were incensed at the lives of Alan Dulles. They
were looking for this motive. Why a pro Castro guy
would shoot Kennedy made no sense. We were at peace
with Castro allegedly, and Dulles zipped up. That was a
(13:39):
favorite of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
In my opinion, we've come to the conclusion that the
big conspiracy that the CIA was behind it is not true.
But are there things that still need to be figured
out or we should still look into?
Speaker 5 (13:51):
For me, the only thing would get my attention in
the newspaper if Castro opened up his archives, which won't happen.
And also there are archives in Mexico City that we
got a peek at because they did their own investigation
in Mexico. The National Archives, at my behest tried for
years to get those from Mexico and couldn't get them.
The sneak peaks we've had are that there was Cuban
(14:15):
contact with Oswald. I'll tell you the story. We were
told by the operatives who were in the Cuban embassy
in Mexico City, who were there at the time. They
said that Oswald came in. They didn't know who he was,
and when he didn't get a visa, immediately he went nuts.
And then he went over to the Russian embassy and
went nuts. And he thought they would know of him
(14:36):
because he had handed out leaflets in New New Orleans
pro Castro and he wanted to be at whatever a
spy for Fidel and he got so mad. And according
to Castro, we know this from Castro's own lips, Oswald said,
I'll kill that bastard Kennedy for you. I'll show you now.
Castro told us that through telling that to his confidants,
(14:56):
who reported it back to the FBI. After he says
that Cuban intelligence operatives in that embassy started to hang
out with this guy during the week that he was there,
which we know nothing, or we felt we knew nothing.
They wanted to suss this guy out see if he
was a Nutter if he really was going to do this.
They even offered in money, and they told us in
(15:17):
our documentary that he turned it down. It wasn't about money,
it was ideology. They said, if you do this, you'll
be a hero. Keep in mind when people ask me
if there was a conspiracy, I say, well, it depends
on your definition. It's a conspiracy of silence. I'm convinced
that Cubans knew he was going to try to do
it and encouraged him because he'd Jeff Gabe been trying
(15:37):
to get a Castro for two years. I don't know
if you know Brian Lttel, former CIA officer, He ran
the Cuba desk for the agency in the eighties, and
they told Brian that well, in the morning of the assassination,
he was in the G two headquarters Cuban Intelligence in Havana,
when work came down from Fidel to redirect all the
(15:58):
surveillance issues that were pointed at Miami, where JM waves
CIA base was, and turned them to Texas. This is
from a Cuban defector to Brian Lttel, And why do
you want to point it Texas? The answer was something's
going to have and I want to be the first
to know from Padel So the word got to him
(16:19):
that something might happen in Texas and he wore to
know immediately. And I believe this got back to Johnson,
this kind of stuff, because he was in touch with
Mexican with the Mexicans, he had great friends in Mexicano,
including the president. And I'm convinced from people I spoke
to that he was told that night there's more to
this than just this guy. He was hanging out with
(16:41):
the wrong people, and that this gets out, it's all
going to blow up. And Johnson just said, I'm not
going there.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
And CIA, we have something called duty to warn. It's
a law, and if we know about an assassination attempt
coming up against a foreign official, even an unfriendly one,
we are honor not honored.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
We are legally bound to tell them this. Now.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
We don't have to go into great detail, we don't
have to give away sourcing. And I can remember one
time in the Philippines there was an advancer of a
country that is very hastile to us, and we had
heard that Islamis were looking to kill him, and I
had to have a meeting with him.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
I sat down.
Speaker 6 (17:17):
His bodyguards were there, and I said, look, you know
who I am.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I'm the CIA, and does.
Speaker 7 (17:22):
A plant to kill you?
Speaker 6 (17:24):
And he laughed because in their you know, this authoritarian government,
they would never do this.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
And he laughed at me. But he did increase his security.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
So they know the Russian, the Russians of the Cubans
wouldn't do that.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
So they didn't hire him. So there goes the cute
Castro did it conspiracy? But Castro knew And if you
call that a conspiracy, find in fact, we were told
many details from these Cuban operatives that they encouraged him
Oswald if he wanted to try this, and that he'd
be a hero, even to the extent that they said,
we'll rescue you if you pulled this off. That's what Well,
(18:00):
I only had one source on that, so I didn't
put it in my book, but I believe him, and
he said Oswald was on his way to rendezvous with
the Russians when Officer Tippett stopped. And remember he shot
Officer Tippet. Most people forget about that, poor guy. He
shot four times point blank by Oswald. So Tippett may
have stopped a rendezvous and the farthest extension of that
(18:20):
story is he said, we told out to what would
fly him to Havana if he pulled this off? And
he said, but we were going to do that. I said,
what are you going to do? So we're going to
dump him into the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So we've talked a little bit about this about the
CIA's involved or did it? And it comes up again
and again. So to go back to where we started
on RFK Junior, there's this view and then Amaryllis Fox,
who is married to his son, former CIA officer for
a couple of years inside, there's this All we need
to do is get into the CIA archives. We get
(18:51):
into the Intelligent Comunity Archives. It'll answer this question for us.
And we've talked about what that actually means and why
stuff might not yet be put out because there are
real reasons for that, not to cover up reasons for that.
You're someone who digs into the paperwork and the archives
and the research. What is your view on what the
CIA is put out and do you think there's a
(19:12):
smoking gun and what hasn't been put Oh.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
Not at all. I've been researching at the National Archives
since the eighties and I also went to the CIA
a couple times because they wanted to hear more about
what I had uncovered in Mexico. They brought me down
to headquarters. But as far as what the CIA has,
people don't understand that everything has been released. What these
people are talking about are cleaner versions of some of
(19:36):
these pages. Every page is out, some with reactions. They
want those reactions unredacted, those reactions, and I've got them
their microscopic. It's not like there's gonna be a great
new narrative. It's two words, and it's usually a person's name.
It's all sources and I've seen the documents and that's
all it can be. There's not going to be any
(19:57):
smoking gun. It's going to be a name of some
Cuban guy who was talking to a CIA guy in
my in Nevada, and he would get killed if that
came out, and he may still be alive. Because these
guys were in their twenties, and I'm against getting rid
of those redactions. Promises were made to people, as you
guys know, when you're out there, we'll protect you if
you talk to us. You can't just change your mind
(20:18):
fifty years later and say well, under the pressure of
Oliver Stone, we're going to release your name. I've seen
some of the reactions they've let out, and it's terrible.
Names of agents of the sources, organized crime sources in Chicago.
So that's what's left. I've seen all the documents, and
the archivists have seen them all, and the review board
(20:38):
who looked at this in the nineties saw everything. It's
gonna be so anti climactic, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
I'm going to tell you now, if I thought that
the US government was behind killing the president of United States,
I would tell people, yeah, I don't like. Give me
your sense of the Oliver Stones JFK movie and where
that conspiracy theory story came from.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
I was there when he filmed it. This was in
the night ninety. He contacted me because he knew that
I knew where all the sources works. I had been
interviewing them for documentaries. I hadn't written the book yet,
but he said, you could be really helpful. I'm doing
this movie. So he brings me to Hollywood. I meet
with him. I didn't know he was going to go
after Jim Garrison at the time, so I said, oh, yeah,
(21:32):
I love to help. I want to see how you
do this. I'd never been around a fifty million dollar
movie production. When I eventually read the script and found
out it was Garrison, I pulled away from the whole thing,
but I was there for a couple months of the project.
A couple months of the project and where that comes
from in his mind. He bought into Jim Garrison right
the New Orleans DA who went after Clay Shaw, who
(21:56):
was accused by the KGB's disinformation of being a CIA
officer who killed Kennedy, and Garrison bought at hook Line
and Sinker. Oliver Stone understandably needed a protagonist for a
Kennedy assassination story, which he was dying to tell. He
told me, he said, this was the movie I always
wanted to make, but I didn't have the clout until
I want a bunch of Academy Awards. Now I had
(22:18):
the cloud to ask for the money to do it.
He sort of identified, I think with Garrison, because Oliver
Stone is kind of a black sheep in Hollywood. Jim
Garrison was a black sheep among DA's. It was the
white Knight against everybody. Well, that's who Oliver Stone is.
This is my own psychological diagnosis here. And I don't
know what Oliver really believes about those witnesses that clayed
(22:41):
that Jim Garrison had because they all eventually admitted they lied.
Jim Garrison forced them to lie on the witness stand
because he was known to pressure people like that. That
was his history in New Orleans. He was not a
good guy and he destroyed a lot of lives over
the course of his life with the accusations, with persecutions
and indictments that went nowhere. Oliver Stone wanted to make
(23:03):
sense of Vietnam because he was traumatized by it and
this was the only thing that made sense to him.
That Kennedy was killed so they could escalate the war
and at last the war made sense to him. And
that's what his conclusion was. He had no evidence of it.
He just used Garrison's evidence, which was meaningless because.
Speaker 6 (23:22):
RFK Junior said, and I haven't looked into this deeply,
but he has said he suspects that CIA was involved
in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 8 (23:33):
There's a six year cutter up. You know, the war
information was run by Alan Dallas, who was ahead of
the CIA, who my uncle fired because.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I was founding.
Speaker 8 (23:45):
Yeah, it was a plot, It was a conspiracy. There
were multiple people involved.
Speaker 7 (23:52):
Why do you think this is this has come up?
Speaker 6 (23:54):
Why he still believes it's now and what are the
conspiracy theories on this one?
Speaker 5 (23:59):
First, I'm not at the expert in RFK. I know
some things about it peripherally. But where that seems to
come from is Sirrahan kept the diary and in the
diary he kept writing or Okay must die. And it
looked to some people like he'd been hypnotized to do
this because he wrote it over and over again. And
they said, he's a Manchurian candidate. Again, no evidence, it
just it's just a convenient thing. There's no link to
(24:22):
him in the CIA. And he also ballistically he did it,
but it's just people want and he says, I oh.
He also said, I can't remember pulling the trigger. Another
Manchurian candidate thing, and who does Manchurian candidates? But the
CIA of course they don't. But that I know, that's
the story that we get from the movies, and they
buy into this RFK. You know, he's into a lot
(24:45):
of conspiracy theories, and I can send you guys a
video it's on YouTube of Surehand giving a lucid, sober
confession to the whole thing. He tells David Frost, I
did it. I'm sorry, I was. I regret it, but
he admitted doing it. The RFK probably knows the same
theories about his uncle that seemed to be on the
(25:06):
surface meaningful, like I'll kill out destroy the CIA. There
was no enmity between the Kennedys and the agency at all,
so the CIA would not want to kill Robert Kennedy.
They never hated him, They never hated Jack.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
It's I don't know, if anything, they probably he the
Kennedy's like Eisenhower before, and probably pushed the CIA to
do too much too.
Speaker 7 (25:26):
It was too handy and easy to get things.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
Done in secret by the CIA, rather than go through
the whole political process and get people on board him.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
Yeah, I've got a great quote from Robert Kennedy and
from JFK, two great quotes from them. Just before they
they both said to the press that any errors in
political operations were not the fault of the CIA. They
did their job. They were instructed by different administrations to
do what they did. They apologized for all these things
(25:54):
in the agency were great people, and Kennedy doubled their budget.
This idea that Robert Kennedy was hated by the CIA,
there's nothing there, absolutely nothing to answer your question. I
can't get inside Robert Kennedy's mind except that he's read
the Manchurian Candidate or something. You know.
Speaker 6 (26:10):
He's gone on about something called Operation Mockingbird. There's not
much out there, but there was an Operation mocking Bird.
And this goes back to the early sixties and it
was one of the things that the CIA got wrong
that came out in the Church Commission, and it was
the CIA and the FBI went after a couple of
journalists because CIA information isial security information was leaking. And
(26:33):
the person who authorized this bugging of journalists was none
other than Robert Kennedy. So, yeah, telling him to do it.
And yet this is but it sounds cool, well, operation
mocking Bird, but the yeah, look into it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
It's actually there's like way less there than meets theory.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
Robert Kennedy was so into covert action. He authought rises
the wire taps on Martin Luther King, the illegal wiretaps.
He would go down to JM Wave CIA based in
Florida during the height of these Cuban operations and walk
in and tear documents off the teletype and just walk
out with them classified need to know papers and the
people down there who I spoke to yelled at it.
(27:13):
What are where are you going with this stuff? He
was training Cuban exiles that were friends of his in
his backyard at hip Hickory Hill. They were doing training exercises.
He didn't understand any tradecraft. It was going to blow
everything up, and it did. But he loved this stuff.
That was not an enemy thing with the CIA. He
really dug it. He wanted to be a spy. I
think we just can't undo the enmity that came out
(27:35):
for the agency in the seventies with the church stuff.
That's still faced with a lot of people, right.
Speaker 7 (27:41):
And I don't want to speak ill of the Kennedys
here either.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
Their mindset they're coming out of they're worried that the
world is going to be destroyed, and their mindset was
set in fighting the Nazis fifteen years before and fighting
the Japanese and like the saving mankind, and we look
at our mindsets today. Our mentality is very different than
within what they were trying to do, which arguably I
(28:04):
don't even think I was build a better, freer world
if they were willing to get their hands dirty.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
Yeah, that's basically there was the Cold War hysteria. But
I will say the CIA guys to orchestrated the Bay
of Pigs told me that it was more than that.
They said the Kennedys personally had it in for Padel.
It was a personal thing because they lost to him
after the at the Bay Pigs, and Fidel spent months
traveling the world and making fun of the Kennedys, calling
(28:30):
them Cretans and just rubbing their nose in it constantly
that we beat the big bully, and that really chafed
that the Kennedys. According to the CIA officers, they said
this was a personal thing between the Kennedy brothers and
the Castro brothers. And I think some of that plays
into it too, because the Kennedys weren't used to losing
anything obviously.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
You know, incredible investigative reporter. I read your book Best
of Enemies about a Russian KGB officer, a Soviet and
then Russian KGB officer Ganadi Vasilinko. I have to say,
I'm amazed at how much stuff you dug up because
I worked directly on the issues that led to the
arrest of Robert Hansen and the illegals arrested in twenty ten,
Russian legalsss than twenty ten and all these other kind
(29:10):
of things. It's all these people that are in your book,
Jack Platt, James, Mike Rocheford, Paul Redmond, They're all I
was all worked very closely with them, so I was
really impressed with that.
Speaker 5 (29:20):
Yeah, that story came to me Jack Platt called. I'd
met Jack just in passing at a book party years
before this, and he called me up one day out
of the blue and said that Robert de Niro said,
you're the guy to do my book.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
I fixed you.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
I said, excuse me, Jack Platt, I said, yeah, I
want to do a book about me and my friend
me and my friend Ganati and U. I said, sounds
interesting because I knew a little bit about it and
I signed on to it. But yeah, I work a
hard on these projects. I call up everybody till they
agree to talk to me, and sometimes you just get
a crumb and sometimes you get something, you can bring
it full circle. These assets, these sources that with the
(29:57):
FBI and the CIA used in the sixties to talk
about Cuba or Russia. You're putting them in harm's way,
and now we're going to release their names because Oliver
Stone wants you to. It's inside it.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
I've said this many times, probably even on this podcast.
The bulk of the classified information that the Sea gets
from human sources are from our partners overseas, right, So
the British and the French, and the Tunisians and the
Malaysians and everybody we share, we work together. They're not spies,
their representatives of their own government, and they're saying, hey, listen,
(30:29):
we have a good relationship with you.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
You've helped us on things.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
Let me tell you what's happening here.
Speaker 5 (30:33):
This is probably the biggest thing that these amateur conspiracy
people don't realize at all. They have no conception of
the human aspect of what you guys do.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
I'm aware of this one story.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
There was a European country and after nine to eleven,
in an interview, one of their ministers says, oh.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Yeah, that happened the United States.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
But we're Europe and this isn't going to happen here,
but we are keeping tabs on and he named some figure.
I don't remember what it was, but it was like
two hundred and fifty odd people that we suspect of
having terrorist connections who would attack the United States or
kill Americans at or Israelis and Jews and the local
people at this embassy like, we don't know about this list,
(31:18):
and the government says, basically, oh, he misspoke. The minister did,
but I'll tell you. Within within a week we had
three or four copies of the list, not from spies,
but from people who just couldn't live with themselves. It's like,
you didn't get this for me. Here's the list. You
just need to be careful. I don't want any more
people killed. And these are patriotic people of that country.
(31:39):
They're not our spies. If you try to give them
like twenty bucks there after, they'd never talked to you again.
People are people, and I think the government, that government,
my sense was they even knew that was going to happen,
they just didn't want it to be official.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Fascinating, Well, that's the world that is never portrayed in
the media, and so people just don't understand those nuances
of what you do.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
So I spend a lot of time in the counter
terrorism Center, and you know that tends to be pretty
rough and tumble. Sometimes lives are in the line, and
you have to make some difficult moral calls and in
doing that, and say, with John, we didn't so much
talk to Rabbi Aser Priest, but we did talk to
lawyers off friggin' line, and the fact that lawyers.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Were on everything. Am I going to go to tell
me I'm not going to go to jail for this? Right? Wow?
Speaker 7 (32:27):
So I'm just looking forward if I'm.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
In the CIA now and somebody comes to me from
the NSC and says, I want you to put together
a plan to take over Greenland, just you know, as
an example, just or I want you to take Denmark
or Panama.
Speaker 7 (32:45):
First of all, I'm going to go to a lawyer.
Speaker 6 (32:46):
And second of all, if you're smart, you're going to say,
I got other things to do, right, I mean, you're
going to decline to do that. And I don't know
what it was like, Unlike with the Bay of Pigs,
where I think they thought they were saving Cuba and
then finding a Cold war, So taking over Greenland, there's
going to be some lawyers who have some really difficult conversations.
Speaker 7 (33:07):
They go to the they talk to officers and look
to the law barks. It's like, because presidents can't order
I llegal things.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
When the Kennedys were ordering things, and when Eisenhower was
ordering things, a lot of those things were still legal.
Now they're not. They've changed the laws. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
So what is it you're working on now, Well.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
Just helping the screenwriter. You know, our book Best of
Enemies got optioned and we got a really great companies
behind it, with a lot of big actors involved in
a big screenwriter, and so it's very serious and we're
working very hard on that screenplay. And I've got two
or three other projects that are not books, but mostly
Hollywood related.
Speaker 7 (33:43):
It's been great, it really his.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
Oh well, thank you so much, appreciate.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
I had a good time.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
Pleasure talking to you guys. Then I can't wait to
keep talking to you, as is my wanting.
Speaker 6 (33:53):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 7 (34:00):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner mission implausible.
Speaker 6 (34:03):
It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
iHeart Podcasts,
John and I are on break. Now we're on a
secret mission and this before all new Mission Implausible episodes
come out this fall. But for now, we'll bring you
one of our favorite past episodes and we'll soon be
launching our YouTube channel. See you there.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
So today's guest is Gus Russo. He's an investigative reporter
and writer. He's an author of many books on subjects
from JFK to to Fidel Castro, gangsters, the FBI, CIA,
and so, Gus, it's great to have with.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
You with us today.
Speaker 5 (01:14):
Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
I'm sort of one of these people that has dug
into everything related to mar I wanted to talk you
about RFK Junior is resurrecting a conspiracy theory that the
CIA was behind the murder of President John F.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
And you've written some You've written a lot about this
in fact, and so could you tell us a little
bit about that conspiracy. It's something that just doesn't seem
to die. And Jerry and I get it all the time.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
It's one of the craziest ones because there's no evidence
at all that the CIA did it. It's just total
theory based on pretty much nothing. I lived through it.
I was interested in this case back in the seventies.
I attended the House Select Committee on Assassination's hearings. The
open hearings interviewed a lot of people. My theory about
why they say this is that we all lived through
(01:58):
the Church Committee years and when the Church Committee fingered
the CIA for doing all these plots around the world,
it left an impression on a generation that the CIA
is the source of all evil. And I think we
all might agree that those operations were am entirely the
branch out of the white houses that were around, whether
(02:19):
it's Eisenhower or Kennedy, but a young generation thought that
the CIA masterminded all these plots and coups and everything,
and that stuck with a lot of people, even in
the face of subsequent evidence to the contrary. I do
you really look at it hard. What they go back
to is a phrase that President Kennedy allegedly said after
(02:40):
the Bay Pig. Tom Wicker wrote an article in The
New York Times about the Bay of Pigs and thirty
pages in he put a quotation in there that came
from an anonymous source that heard from another anonymous source.
The President Kennedy said, I'm going to tear the CIA
to a thousand pieces. There's no way to know if
you ever said it, because we have no way of
knowing where it came from. I don't believe he ever
(03:00):
said it, and the people of the intelligence field who
were back and there in those days also say they
have no idea that he ever said it. In fact,
President Kennedy doubled the CIA's budget and ivoy it and
got an internal ci A report of their relationship with
all presidential administrations, and by far the best relationship they
(03:23):
had was with JFK. That's what they said. So that's it.
Based on this quote that Kennedy was going to tear
the CIA into a thousand pieces, which he obviously didn't do,
and that he fired Alan Dulles, who was his CIA
director at the time of the Bay of Pigs. And
he didn't fire Alan Dulles. In reality, all you have
to do is read Dulles's biographies and you'll see that
(03:44):
Dulles offered his resignation after the Bay of Pigs and
Kennedy turned him down. Kennedy said, no, Alan, you're a
friend of the family. We wanted you to stay on
when you wanted to retire. Anyway, you only stayed on
because we begged you to. He didn't want to be there,
and he was saying, come on, let me resign and
you'll look better and I'll be retired. Please stay on.
He offered three times to resign. Finally, in the fall,
(04:07):
four or five months after the Bad Pigs, Kennedy said,
I guess you should go. The heat is getting too much.
But thank you, you've been great. He stayed close friends
with Dallan Dallis, as did Robert Kennedy. We'd have all
the letters back and forth between them. One of the
most telling things is that when LBJ set up the
Warren Commission, it was Robert Kennedy, who pretty much demanded
(04:27):
that Johnson put Dulles on the Warren Commission. He was
like an uncle to the book, to the Kennedy brothers,
and against that, they have this one.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
Alleged quote, if Kennedy was going to rip the CIA
in one thousand pieces, replace it with something else, replace personnel,
as there'd be paperwork involved in that.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Right from Kennedy's.
Speaker 6 (04:46):
Paper, He'd be giving orders, there'd be discussions that would
be in the NSC. So making a simple declarative sentence,
whether he made it or not, doesn't mean he's.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Going to file through.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
And if he was going to follow through, CIA would
know it because they would know through the NSC they'd
be talking about replacements personnel.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
There's no evidence of any of that.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Let me ask you, there are some real conspiracies, and
I think you did some digging in front out. There
actually is a conspiracy around this, and the conspiracy is
that the Soviet intelligence services used money and their influence
to try to push this conspiracy theory.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Is that true?
Speaker 5 (05:25):
Yeah, that's true. Disinformation is certainly real, and I think
what we're going through now, it's my contention that they
perfected disinformation. The Soviets at the time, came up with
the CIA, created ads, The CIA tried to kill the pope.
The CII did everything, but this was their laboratory, the
Kennedy case, and it started immediately after with getting books published,
(05:48):
magazine articles, newspaper articles. They would read our stuff, as
you know, they read our papers and books and find
a way to insert into our own narrative little things
that would seem to make sense. I will agree, I
wouldn't call that a conspiracy. That's just intelligence world.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Well, Russian intelligences conspired to say what can we do
to create a price grotory and put it into their
systems in a way, conspiracy just more than one person
coming up with the plan to do something. And frankly,
Gus there was some connections between the CIA and the
jfk assassination, not in the fact that any CIA people
were involved in it. But as you remember, there was
(06:25):
a Russian, a Soviet defector named Urinasenko who came to
the United States around that time, and he had known
Lee Harvey Oswald. He had seen Lee Harvey Oswald's file
when he worked for the KGB second chief director at
the internal part of it. Sure of course, this created
inside the government a big oh my god, you know
where the Russians involved in the assassination. They've interviewed him,
(06:48):
and they looked at him and they thought that, you know,
there's no way he would because he's a marine and
he defected to the Soviet Union. Therefore, they'd be greatly
interested in him and they would use him as a
potential assassin.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
John lb Jay knew pretty quickly that Russia had nothing
to do with it because NSA was bugging Nikita's dasha
and his other residences and they heard him talking about,
oh my god, how did this happen? This guy lived here?
Oh my god, they're going to think we did it.
And the NSA report that back to Johnson and that
sort of put that away for the government. We knew
(07:19):
Russia didn't have anything to do with it, but Russia
was so concerned that we might think that they sent
Uri over to make sure we knew they had nothing
to do with it. But for me, the fascinating mystery,
I don't want to take conspiracy, but the lasting mystery
of that whole thing is what happened in Mexico with
Oswald hanging with Cubans for about a week. And that
(07:39):
is I've dug up a lot of things there that
make it look like they knew what was going to happen,
that Oswald was going to do this, and that has
never been investigated by the government at all. Warren Commission
didn't look into it. The House Committee spent two days
down there. Our researcher. We hired a detective for a
documentary I did, and we spent he spent about a
(07:59):
year dredging up embassy sources who were there when Oswald
was there for us, and we learned a lot. And
by the way, I interviewed during Nasenko for a documentary
I did with Peter Jennings probably twenty years ago. When
I did a show with Croplind back in ninety three
called Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? It was a big undertaking.
We spent two years traveling the world interviewing. We had
(08:21):
a big budget. Our senior producer, Mike Sullivan, said, let's
find out first if Oswald pulled the trigger, Let's see
who shot him first, and we could work backwards from him.
That's the easiest way to do it. And so we
spent the first few months trying to figure out forensically
ballistically who did it? And it was overwhelming. Oswald fired
all the shots and then it became a lot easier
(08:41):
to see who he was connected to, which was nobody,
and we went We really worked hard, We tried to
do the due diligence, and it just didn't hang up.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Hold up.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
He was the ultimate loaner, no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
I think that's why conspiracies get built up, right, how
is it possible that this absolute loser could impact world history?
And so people have to create stories to fill that void.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
And Lee Harvey Altiswalld had a very powerful gun, that
Carcato rifle. We spoke to all the ballistics people, this
is a gun you did not want to get in
front of. This thing is like a cannon. And he
was good with it. I held his Marine targets in
my hand, and he was a good shooter at two
hundred yards with a bolt action weapon. I can go
with this ballistic stuff forever. But I'd just say that
(09:26):
this was an easy shot. People who say it was
a hard shot, I asked them, where did you hear that?
And they say, I don't know if somebody told me.
When you really look at it, it was a really
easy shot. You only hit twice, two hits in nine
seconds from a target that's moving slowly away from him.
It was nothing anybody could have learned to do that shot.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
In the CIA officers, we're not saying there's no conspiracy,
there's no possibility of it. There are permutations be between
Oswald did it on his own and Oswald was a.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Dupe and a stooge of the Russians of the CIA.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
It certainly possibly he could have mentioned this too while
he was in Mexican talking to the Soviets. A low
level guy would write it up and send it in
in the KGB archives. Or he could have told Cuban
intelligence officers when he's down there, I'm gonna get Kennedy.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
Which does exactly what he said, exactly what.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
So for us, though, it's is their proof, and in
the intelligence world, you don't want to be pretty sure
when the possibility of getting it wrong is nuclear war.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Right.
Speaker 7 (10:27):
When the Warren Report.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
Was written, the concern was that if people really came
to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that it was the
Soviets that did it, they were concerned that there'd be
forty million dead inside it three hours, right, if we
point the finger wrongly and things get out of control.
So today we don't really think about that so much, except,
of course, when we have WMD in Iraq, where agency officers,
(10:53):
analysts who Johnny and I know some of them. They
were pretty darn sure that there was WMD in Iraq, right,
I mean they saidam said he had it.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
There was reporting that it was there.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
He had it in the past, He's threatened to use it,
but we didn't have proof that it was there.
Speaker 7 (11:11):
We just were like pretty sure. And so same for
the Warren Report. Weld onto the second. Well, we take
a quick break.
Speaker 5 (11:31):
And we're back. I've been a few literally thousands of
people on this subject over the years, and what I concluded,
what I learned from them. Johnson feared World War three
was going to break out, and he was terrified of that.
So when the Warren Commission was formed, he instructed the
(11:52):
FBI to not investigate Mexico City. He was afraid of
where it might lead. Yeah, and I'm hanging on my wall.
A letter from the FBI guy who went down to
Mexico City, the only Spanish speaker who could go down
and investigate the Cubans. He went down that night and
he was called in his hotel rooms and he was
told that Johnson had told Hoover to tell him do
(12:13):
not leave your room, don't talk to anybody while the
trail was hot. I just don't want to go there.
He was terrified. Even though he knew that the Kruse
Jef didn't push this thing. He was worried that if
they found that the Castro was behind it, Americans would
demand retaliation against Castro, which would bring the Russians in
like they had a year earlier during the missile crisis,
(12:34):
which was right at the front of Johnson's mind. The
crisis had just happened, so he was worried that Cuba
might have had something to do with this, or was
involved or had knowledge, and he didn't want to go there.
So there was no investigation of Oswald in Mexico. And
another interesting thing, Bobby Kennedy was the one who put Duallas,
his family friend, on the Warren Commission. Dulles knew about
(12:58):
the plots that Robert Kennedy with the CIA were trying
to pull off against Fidel, and Dulles never told the
other commissioners they were dying to know why a pro
Castro guy like Oswald would shoot Kennedy, and Dallas said,
I have no idea, and they looked at him and said,
were we doing anything to piss off Lee? Harvey Oswald
(13:18):
and the Warrenck Commission attorneys that I've interviewed said when
they found out about these plots via the Church Committee,
they were incensed at the lives of Alan Dulles. They
were looking for this motive. Why a pro Castro guy
would shoot Kennedy made no sense. We were at peace
with Castro allegedly, and Dulles zipped up. That was a
(13:39):
favorite of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
In my opinion, we've come to the conclusion that the
big conspiracy that the CIA was behind it is not true.
But are there things that still need to be figured
out or we should still look into?
Speaker 5 (13:51):
For me, the only thing would get my attention in
the newspaper if Castro opened up his archives, which won't happen.
And also there are archives in Mexico City that we
got a peek at because they did their own investigation
in Mexico. The National Archives, at my behest tried for
years to get those from Mexico and couldn't get them.
The sneak peaks we've had are that there was Cuban
(14:15):
contact with Oswald. I'll tell you the story. We were
told by the operatives who were in the Cuban embassy
in Mexico City, who were there at the time. They
said that Oswald came in. They didn't know who he was,
and when he didn't get a visa, immediately he went nuts.
And then he went over to the Russian embassy and
went nuts. And he thought they would know of him
(14:36):
because he had handed out leaflets in New New Orleans
pro Castro and he wanted to be at whatever a
spy for Fidel and he got so mad. And according
to Castro, we know this from Castro's own lips, Oswald said,
I'll kill that bastard Kennedy for you. I'll show you now.
Castro told us that through telling that to his confidants,
(14:56):
who reported it back to the FBI. After he says
that Cuban intelligence operatives in that embassy started to hang
out with this guy during the week that he was there,
which we know nothing, or we felt we knew nothing.
They wanted to suss this guy out see if he
was a Nutter if he really was going to do this.
They even offered in money, and they told us in
(15:17):
our documentary that he turned it down. It wasn't about money,
it was ideology. They said, if you do this, you'll
be a hero. Keep in mind when people ask me
if there was a conspiracy, I say, well, it depends
on your definition. It's a conspiracy of silence. I'm convinced
that Cubans knew he was going to try to do
it and encouraged him because he'd Jeff Gabe been trying
(15:37):
to get a Castro for two years. I don't know
if you know Brian Lttel, former CIA officer, He ran
the Cuba desk for the agency in the eighties, and
they told Brian that well, in the morning of the assassination,
he was in the G two headquarters Cuban Intelligence in Havana,
when work came down from Fidel to redirect all the
(15:58):
surveillance issues that were pointed at Miami, where JM waves
CIA base was, and turned them to Texas. This is
from a Cuban defector to Brian Lttel, And why do
you want to point it Texas? The answer was something's
going to have and I want to be the first
to know from Padel So the word got to him
(16:19):
that something might happen in Texas and he wore to
know immediately. And I believe this got back to Johnson,
this kind of stuff, because he was in touch with
Mexican with the Mexicans, he had great friends in Mexicano,
including the president. And I'm convinced from people I spoke
to that he was told that night there's more to
this than just this guy. He was hanging out with
(16:41):
the wrong people, and that this gets out, it's all
going to blow up. And Johnson just said, I'm not
going there.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
And CIA, we have something called duty to warn. It's
a law, and if we know about an assassination attempt
coming up against a foreign official, even an unfriendly one,
we are honor not honored.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
We are legally bound to tell them this. Now.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
We don't have to go into great detail, we don't
have to give away sourcing. And I can remember one
time in the Philippines there was an advancer of a
country that is very hastile to us, and we had
heard that Islamis were looking to kill him, and I
had to have a meeting with him.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
I sat down.
Speaker 6 (17:17):
His bodyguards were there, and I said, look, you know
who I am.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I'm the CIA, and does.
Speaker 7 (17:22):
A plant to kill you?
Speaker 6 (17:24):
And he laughed because in their you know, this authoritarian government,
they would never do this.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
And he laughed at me. But he did increase his security.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
So they know the Russian, the Russians of the Cubans
wouldn't do that.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
So they didn't hire him. So there goes the cute
Castro did it conspiracy? But Castro knew And if you
call that a conspiracy, find in fact, we were told
many details from these Cuban operatives that they encouraged him
Oswald if he wanted to try this, and that he'd
be a hero, even to the extent that they said,
we'll rescue you if you pulled this off. That's what Well,
(18:00):
I only had one source on that, so I didn't
put it in my book, but I believe him, and
he said Oswald was on his way to rendezvous with
the Russians when Officer Tippett stopped. And remember he shot
Officer Tippet. Most people forget about that, poor guy. He
shot four times point blank by Oswald. So Tippett may
have stopped a rendezvous and the farthest extension of that
(18:20):
story is he said, we told out to what would
fly him to Havana if he pulled this off? And
he said, but we were going to do that. I said,
what are you going to do? So we're going to
dump him into the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So we've talked a little bit about this about the
CIA's involved or did it? And it comes up again
and again. So to go back to where we started
on RFK Junior, there's this view and then Amaryllis Fox,
who is married to his son, former CIA officer for
a couple of years inside, there's this All we need
to do is get into the CIA archives. We get
(18:51):
into the Intelligent Comunity Archives. It'll answer this question for us.
And we've talked about what that actually means and why
stuff might not yet be put out because there are
real reasons for that, not to cover up reasons for that.
You're someone who digs into the paperwork and the archives
and the research. What is your view on what the
CIA is put out and do you think there's a
(19:12):
smoking gun and what hasn't been put Oh.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
Not at all. I've been researching at the National Archives
since the eighties and I also went to the CIA
a couple times because they wanted to hear more about
what I had uncovered in Mexico. They brought me down
to headquarters. But as far as what the CIA has,
people don't understand that everything has been released. What these
people are talking about are cleaner versions of some of
(19:36):
these pages. Every page is out, some with reactions. They
want those reactions unredacted, those reactions, and I've got them
their microscopic. It's not like there's gonna be a great
new narrative. It's two words, and it's usually a person's name.
It's all sources and I've seen the documents and that's
all it can be. There's not going to be any
(19:57):
smoking gun. It's going to be a name of some
Cuban guy who was talking to a CIA guy in
my in Nevada, and he would get killed if that
came out, and he may still be alive. Because these
guys were in their twenties, and I'm against getting rid
of those redactions. Promises were made to people, as you
guys know, when you're out there, we'll protect you if
you talk to us. You can't just change your mind
(20:18):
fifty years later and say well, under the pressure of
Oliver Stone, we're going to release your name. I've seen
some of the reactions they've let out, and it's terrible.
Names of agents of the sources, organized crime sources in Chicago.
So that's what's left. I've seen all the documents, and
the archivists have seen them all, and the review board
(20:38):
who looked at this in the nineties saw everything. It's
gonna be so anti climactic, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
I'm going to tell you now, if I thought that
the US government was behind killing the president of United States,
I would tell people, yeah, I don't like. Give me
your sense of the Oliver Stones JFK movie and where
that conspiracy theory story came from.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
I was there when he filmed it. This was in
the night ninety. He contacted me because he knew that
I knew where all the sources works. I had been
interviewing them for documentaries. I hadn't written the book yet,
but he said, you could be really helpful. I'm doing
this movie. So he brings me to Hollywood. I meet
with him. I didn't know he was going to go
after Jim Garrison at the time, so I said, oh, yeah,
(21:32):
I love to help. I want to see how you
do this. I'd never been around a fifty million dollar
movie production. When I eventually read the script and found
out it was Garrison, I pulled away from the whole thing,
but I was there for a couple months of the project.
A couple months of the project and where that comes
from in his mind. He bought into Jim Garrison right
the New Orleans DA who went after Clay Shaw, who
(21:56):
was accused by the KGB's disinformation of being a CIA
officer who killed Kennedy, and Garrison bought at hook Line
and Sinker. Oliver Stone understandably needed a protagonist for a
Kennedy assassination story, which he was dying to tell. He
told me, he said, this was the movie I always
wanted to make, but I didn't have the clout until
I want a bunch of Academy Awards. Now I had
(22:18):
the cloud to ask for the money to do it.
He sort of identified, I think with Garrison, because Oliver
Stone is kind of a black sheep in Hollywood. Jim
Garrison was a black sheep among DA's. It was the
white Knight against everybody. Well, that's who Oliver Stone is.
This is my own psychological diagnosis here. And I don't
know what Oliver really believes about those witnesses that clayed
(22:41):
that Jim Garrison had because they all eventually admitted they lied.
Jim Garrison forced them to lie on the witness stand
because he was known to pressure people like that. That
was his history in New Orleans. He was not a
good guy and he destroyed a lot of lives over
the course of his life with the accusations, with persecutions
and indictments that went nowhere. Oliver Stone wanted to make
(23:03):
sense of Vietnam because he was traumatized by it and
this was the only thing that made sense to him.
That Kennedy was killed so they could escalate the war
and at last the war made sense to him. And
that's what his conclusion was. He had no evidence of it.
He just used Garrison's evidence, which was meaningless because.
Speaker 6 (23:22):
RFK Junior said, and I haven't looked into this deeply,
but he has said he suspects that CIA was involved
in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 8 (23:33):
There's a six year cutter up. You know, the war
information was run by Alan Dallas, who was ahead of
the CIA, who my uncle fired because.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I was founding.
Speaker 8 (23:45):
Yeah, it was a plot, It was a conspiracy. There
were multiple people involved.
Speaker 7 (23:52):
Why do you think this is this has come up?
Speaker 6 (23:54):
Why he still believes it's now and what are the
conspiracy theories on this one?
Speaker 5 (23:59):
First, I'm not at the expert in RFK. I know
some things about it peripherally. But where that seems to
come from is Sirrahan kept the diary and in the
diary he kept writing or Okay must die. And it
looked to some people like he'd been hypnotized to do
this because he wrote it over and over again. And
they said, he's a Manchurian candidate. Again, no evidence, it
just it's just a convenient thing. There's no link to
(24:22):
him in the CIA. And he also ballistically he did it,
but it's just people want and he says, I oh.
He also said, I can't remember pulling the trigger. Another
Manchurian candidate thing, and who does Manchurian candidates? But the
CIA of course they don't. But that I know, that's
the story that we get from the movies, and they
buy into this RFK. You know, he's into a lot
(24:45):
of conspiracy theories, and I can send you guys a
video it's on YouTube of Surehand giving a lucid, sober
confession to the whole thing. He tells David Frost, I
did it. I'm sorry, I was. I regret it, but
he admitted doing it. The RFK probably knows the same
theories about his uncle that seemed to be on the
(25:06):
surface meaningful, like I'll kill out destroy the CIA. There
was no enmity between the Kennedys and the agency at all,
so the CIA would not want to kill Robert Kennedy.
They never hated him, They never hated Jack.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
It's I don't know, if anything, they probably he the
Kennedy's like Eisenhower before, and probably pushed the CIA to
do too much too.
Speaker 7 (25:26):
It was too handy and easy to get things.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
Done in secret by the CIA, rather than go through
the whole political process and get people on board him.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
Yeah, I've got a great quote from Robert Kennedy and
from JFK, two great quotes from them. Just before they
they both said to the press that any errors in
political operations were not the fault of the CIA. They
did their job. They were instructed by different administrations to
do what they did. They apologized for all these things
(25:54):
in the agency were great people, and Kennedy doubled their budget.
This idea that Robert Kennedy was hated by the CIA,
there's nothing there, absolutely nothing to answer your question. I
can't get inside Robert Kennedy's mind except that he's read
the Manchurian Candidate or something. You know.
Speaker 6 (26:10):
He's gone on about something called Operation Mockingbird. There's not
much out there, but there was an Operation mocking Bird.
And this goes back to the early sixties and it
was one of the things that the CIA got wrong
that came out in the Church Commission, and it was
the CIA and the FBI went after a couple of
journalists because CIA information isial security information was leaking. And
(26:33):
the person who authorized this bugging of journalists was none
other than Robert Kennedy. So, yeah, telling him to do it.
And yet this is but it sounds cool, well, operation
mocking Bird, but the yeah, look into it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
It's actually there's like way less there than meets theory.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
Robert Kennedy was so into covert action. He authought rises
the wire taps on Martin Luther King, the illegal wiretaps.
He would go down to JM Wave CIA based in
Florida during the height of these Cuban operations and walk
in and tear documents off the teletype and just walk
out with them classified need to know papers and the
people down there who I spoke to yelled at it.
(27:13):
What are where are you going with this stuff? He
was training Cuban exiles that were friends of his in
his backyard at hip Hickory Hill. They were doing training exercises.
He didn't understand any tradecraft. It was going to blow
everything up, and it did. But he loved this stuff.
That was not an enemy thing with the CIA. He
really dug it. He wanted to be a spy. I
think we just can't undo the enmity that came out
(27:35):
for the agency in the seventies with the church stuff.
That's still faced with a lot of people, right.
Speaker 7 (27:41):
And I don't want to speak ill of the Kennedys
here either.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
Their mindset they're coming out of they're worried that the
world is going to be destroyed, and their mindset was
set in fighting the Nazis fifteen years before and fighting
the Japanese and like the saving mankind, and we look
at our mindsets today. Our mentality is very different than
within what they were trying to do, which arguably I
(28:04):
don't even think I was build a better, freer world
if they were willing to get their hands dirty.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
Yeah, that's basically there was the Cold War hysteria. But
I will say the CIA guys to orchestrated the Bay
of Pigs told me that it was more than that.
They said the Kennedys personally had it in for Padel.
It was a personal thing because they lost to him
after the at the Bay Pigs, and Fidel spent months
traveling the world and making fun of the Kennedys, calling
(28:30):
them Cretans and just rubbing their nose in it constantly
that we beat the big bully, and that really chafed
that the Kennedys. According to the CIA officers, they said
this was a personal thing between the Kennedy brothers and
the Castro brothers. And I think some of that plays
into it too, because the Kennedys weren't used to losing
anything obviously.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
You know, incredible investigative reporter. I read your book Best
of Enemies about a Russian KGB officer, a Soviet and
then Russian KGB officer Ganadi Vasilinko. I have to say,
I'm amazed at how much stuff you dug up because
I worked directly on the issues that led to the
arrest of Robert Hansen and the illegals arrested in twenty ten,
Russian legalsss than twenty ten and all these other kind
(29:10):
of things. It's all these people that are in your book,
Jack Platt, James, Mike Rocheford, Paul Redmond, They're all I
was all worked very closely with them, so I was
really impressed with that.
Speaker 5 (29:20):
Yeah, that story came to me Jack Platt called. I'd
met Jack just in passing at a book party years
before this, and he called me up one day out
of the blue and said that Robert de Niro said,
you're the guy to do my book.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
I fixed you.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
I said, excuse me, Jack Platt, I said, yeah, I
want to do a book about me and my friend
me and my friend Ganati and U. I said, sounds
interesting because I knew a little bit about it and
I signed on to it. But yeah, I work a
hard on these projects. I call up everybody till they
agree to talk to me, and sometimes you just get
a crumb and sometimes you get something, you can bring
it full circle. These assets, these sources that with the
(29:57):
FBI and the CIA used in the sixties to talk
about Cuba or Russia. You're putting them in harm's way,
and now we're going to release their names because Oliver
Stone wants you to. It's inside it.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
I've said this many times, probably even on this podcast.
The bulk of the classified information that the Sea gets
from human sources are from our partners overseas, right, So
the British and the French, and the Tunisians and the
Malaysians and everybody we share, we work together. They're not spies,
their representatives of their own government, and they're saying, hey, listen,
(30:29):
we have a good relationship with you.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
You've helped us on things.
Speaker 4 (30:31):
Let me tell you what's happening here.
Speaker 5 (30:33):
This is probably the biggest thing that these amateur conspiracy
people don't realize at all. They have no conception of
the human aspect of what you guys do.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
I'm aware of this one story.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
There was a European country and after nine to eleven,
in an interview, one of their ministers says, oh.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Yeah, that happened the United States.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
But we're Europe and this isn't going to happen here,
but we are keeping tabs on and he named some figure.
I don't remember what it was, but it was like
two hundred and fifty odd people that we suspect of
having terrorist connections who would attack the United States or
kill Americans at or Israelis and Jews and the local
people at this embassy like, we don't know about this list,
(31:18):
and the government says, basically, oh, he misspoke. The minister did,
but I'll tell you. Within within a week we had
three or four copies of the list, not from spies,
but from people who just couldn't live with themselves. It's like,
you didn't get this for me. Here's the list. You
just need to be careful. I don't want any more
people killed. And these are patriotic people of that country.
(31:39):
They're not our spies. If you try to give them
like twenty bucks there after, they'd never talked to you again.
People are people, and I think the government, that government,
my sense was they even knew that was going to happen,
they just didn't want it to be official.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Fascinating, Well, that's the world that is never portrayed in
the media, and so people just don't understand those nuances
of what you do.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
So I spend a lot of time in the counter
terrorism Center, and you know that tends to be pretty
rough and tumble. Sometimes lives are in the line, and
you have to make some difficult moral calls and in
doing that, and say, with John, we didn't so much
talk to Rabbi Aser Priest, but we did talk to
lawyers off friggin' line, and the fact that lawyers.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Were on everything. Am I going to go to tell
me I'm not going to go to jail for this? Right? Wow?
Speaker 7 (32:27):
So I'm just looking forward if I'm.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
In the CIA now and somebody comes to me from
the NSC and says, I want you to put together
a plan to take over Greenland, just you know, as
an example, just or I want you to take Denmark
or Panama.
Speaker 7 (32:45):
First of all, I'm going to go to a lawyer.
Speaker 6 (32:46):
And second of all, if you're smart, you're going to say,
I got other things to do, right, I mean, you're
going to decline to do that. And I don't know
what it was like, Unlike with the Bay of Pigs,
where I think they thought they were saving Cuba and
then finding a Cold war, So taking over Greenland, there's
going to be some lawyers who have some really difficult conversations.
Speaker 7 (33:07):
They go to the they talk to officers and look
to the law barks. It's like, because presidents can't order
I llegal things.
Speaker 5 (33:13):
When the Kennedys were ordering things, and when Eisenhower was
ordering things, a lot of those things were still legal.
Now they're not. They've changed the laws. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
So what is it you're working on now, Well.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
Just helping the screenwriter. You know, our book Best of
Enemies got optioned and we got a really great companies
behind it, with a lot of big actors involved in
a big screenwriter, and so it's very serious and we're
working very hard on that screenplay. And I've got two
or three other projects that are not books, but mostly
Hollywood related.
Speaker 7 (33:43):
It's been great, it really his.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
Oh well, thank you so much, appreciate.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
I had a good time.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
Pleasure talking to you guys. Then I can't wait to
keep talking to you, as is my wanting.
Speaker 6 (33:53):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 7 (34:00):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner mission implausible.
Speaker 6 (34:03):
It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
iHeart Podcasts,
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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