February 2, 2025 • 33 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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. 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 Fidel Castro, gangsters,
the FBI, CIA, and so, Gus, g it's great to
have you with us today.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Oh, it's pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You're sort of one of these people that has dug
into everything related to mart 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 (00:58):
Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And you've written some You've read 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 4 (01:07):
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
(01:29):
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 the generation that the CIA
is the source of all evil. And I think we
all might agree that those operations were almost entirely the
brainch out of the white houses that were around, whether
(01:49):
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. Do you
really look at it hard? What they go back to
is a phrase that President Kennedy allegedly said after the
(02:10):
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
one 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 said it,
(02:32):
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 ivoyed and got an internal
CIA report of their relationship with all presidential administrations, and
by far the best relationship they had was with JFK.
(02:55):
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 the 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 Dulles offered
his resignation after the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy turned
(03:18):
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, but please stay on.
He offered three times to resign. Finally, in the fall,
four or five months after the Bad Pigs, Kennedy said,
(03:39):
I guess you should go because the heat is getting
too much. But thank you, you've been great. He stayed
close friends with Dallan Dallas, as did Robert Kennedy. We
have all the letters back and forth between them. One
of the most telling things is that when LBJ set
up the Warrant Commission, it was Robert Kennedy who pretty
much demanded that Johnson put Dulles on on the warrant commission.
(04:01):
He was like an uncle to the book, to the
Kennedy brothers, and against that they have this one alleged quote.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
If Kennedy was going to rip the CIA in one
thousand pieces, replace it with something else, replace personnel as
a There'd be paperwork involved in that right from Kennedy's 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 (04:27):
Going to file through.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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 (04:34):
There's no evidence of any of that.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
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. Is that true?
Speaker 4 (04:55):
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 that the Soviets at the time came up with,
The CIA created aids, 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
(05:17):
published 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 1 (05:34):
Well, Russian intelligences conspired to say what can we do
to create a price grotory and put it into their systems.
So 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
(05:55):
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
(06:18):
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 4 (06:28):
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 reported that back to Johnson and that
sort of put that away for the government. We knew
(06:49):
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 say 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
(07:09):
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
year dredging up embassy sources who were there when Oswald
(07:33):
was there for us, and we learned a lot. And
by the way, I interviewed during Thesenko for a documentary
I did with Peter Jennings probably twenty years ago. When
I did a show with Crouplind 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
a big budget. Our senior producer, Mike Sullivan, said, let's
(07:55):
find out first if Oswald pulled the trigger, let's see
who shot him first, and we could work back words
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. I was
waldfire all the shots, and then it became a lot
easier to see who he was connected to, which was nobody,
and we went We really worked hard. We tried to
(08:17):
do the due diligence and it just didn't hang up.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Hold up.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
He was the ultimate loaner, no doubt about it.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I think that's why conspiracies getting 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 4 (08:33):
And Lee Harvey Alliswall 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
up with this ballistic stuff forever. But I'd just say
(08:55):
that this was an easy shot. People who say it
was a hard shot, I asked him, and 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 2 (09:15):
In a 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
dupe and a stooge of the Russians.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Of the CIA.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
It certainly possibly he could have mentioned this too while
he was in Mexican talking to the Soviets.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
A low level guy would write it up and send
it in in the KGB archives.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Or he could have told Cuban intelligence officers when he's
down there, I'm going to get Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Which does exactly what he said. It's exactly what he said.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah. So for us though, it's is there proof?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
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 (09:57):
Right. When the Warren.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Report 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 of 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
(10:21):
Agency officers, analysts who Johnny and I know some of them.
They were pretty darn sure that there was WMD in Iraq, right,
I mean they Saddam said he had it. There was
reporting that it was there. He had it in the past,
He's threatened to use it. But we didn't have proof
that it was there. We just were like pretty sure.
(10:44):
And so same for the Warren report.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Weld under the second, Well, we take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
And we're back.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
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 Warrant Commission was formed, he instructed the FBI
to not investigate Mexico City. He was afraid of where
(11:26):
it might lead. 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 not leave
your room, don't talk to anybody while the trail was hot.
(11:47):
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 out
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, which was right at
the front of Johnson's mind. The crisis had just happened,
(12:08):
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 Dulls, his family friend,
on the Warren Commission. Dulles knew about the plots that
(12:29):
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 and the Warren
Commission attorneys that I've interviewed said when they found out
(12:53):
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 favorite of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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 where we should still look into.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
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
(13:45):
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
(14:06):
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,
(14:26):
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 him money, and they told us in
(14:47):
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 herod 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
(15:07):
to get a Castro for two years. I don't know
if you know Brian Ltel, former CIA officer. He ran
the Cuba desk for the agency in the eighties, and
they told Brian that well. 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
(15:28):
the 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 happen, and I want to be the
first to note from Fidel. So the word got to
(15:49):
him that something might happen in Texas and he wanted
to know immediately. And I believe this got back to
Johnson this kind of stuff because he was in touch with,
mixed 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
(16:11):
the wrong people, and that this gets out, it's all
gonna blow up. And Johnson just said, I'm not going there.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And CIA, we have something called duty to warn.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
It's a law, and.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
If we know about an assassination attempt coming up against
a foreign official, even an unfriendly one, we are honor
not honored, we are legally bound.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
To tell them this.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Now, 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 advansaer 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. I sat down,
his bodyguards were there and I said, look, but you
know who I am.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I'm the with CIA and does a plot to kill you?
Speaker 2 (16:54):
And he laughed because in their you know, this authoritarian government,
they would never do this, and he laughed at me,
but he did increase his security. So they know the Russian,
the Russians of the Cubans wouldn't do.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
That, 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
(17:30):
we I only had one source on that, so I
didn't put it in my book, but I believe him.
He said Oswald was on his way to rendezvous with
the Russians when Officer Tippitt stopped him. And remember he
shot Officer Tippet. Most people forget about that, poor guy
he shot four times point blank by Oswald. So tippittt
may have stopped at rendezvous and the furthest extension of
(17:50):
that story is he said, we told Oswald would fly
him to Havana if he pulled this off, and he said,
but we weren't going to do that I said, what
were you going to do? So we're going to dump
him into the Gulf of mexic Co.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So we've talked a little bit about this, about the
CIA is 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
(18:21):
into the intelligen 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
(18:42):
smoking gun and what hasn't been put out?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Oh, 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,
understand that everything has been released. What these people are
talking about are cleaner versions of some of these pages.
(19:07):
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 smoking gun.
(19:28):
It's gonna 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, and we'll protect you if you talk
to us. You can't just change your mind fifty years
(19:49):
later and say, well, under the pressure of Oliver Stone,
we're going to release your name. I have seen some
of the redactions they've let out, and it's terrible. Names
of agents of the sources organiz his 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
who looked at this in the nineties saw everything. It's
(20:11):
gonna be so anti climactic, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I'm gonna 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 know, Like, give
me your sense of the Oliver Stones JFK movie and
where that conspiracy theory story came from.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
I was there when he filmed it. This was in
the around nineteen ninety. He contacted me because he knew
that I knew where all the sources worked. 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 and I
meet with him. I didn't know he was going to
go after Jim Garrison at the time, so I said, oh, yeah,
(21:02):
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
(21:26):
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 won a bunch of Academy Awards. Now I had
(21:48):
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 das. 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 Clay
(22:11):
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
(22:33):
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 2 (22:52):
RFK Junior said, and I haven't looked into this that deeply,
but he has said he suspects that CIA was involved
in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
There's a six fear cutter up.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
You know.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
The war information was run by Alan Dallas, who was
ahead of the CIA, who my uncle fired because I
was founding. Yeah, it was a plot, it was a conspiracy.
There were multiple people involved.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Why do you think this is this has come up,
why he still believes it's now and what are the
conspiracy theories on this one?
Speaker 4 (23:29):
First, I'm not at the expert in RFK. I know
some things about it peripherally. But where that seems to
come from is Srahan 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.
He wrote it over and over again, and they said
he's a Manchurian candidate. Again, no evidence, it just it's
(23:50):
just a convenient thing. There's no link to him in
the CIA. And he also ballistically he did it, but
it's just people want and he says 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 uh, they buy into
(24:12):
this RFK. You know he's into a lot 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
(24:34):
that seemed to be on the 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 1 (24:49):
It's I don't know, if anything, they probably he Kennedy's
like Eisenhower before and probably pushed the CIA to do
too much. It is too It was too handy and
easy to get things done in secret by the CIA,
rather than go through the whole political process and get
people on board.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
I've got a great quote from Robert Kennedy and from JFK,
two great quotes from them. Just before 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 in the agency were
(25:26):
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 2 (25:40):
He's gone on about something called Operation mocking Bird. There's
not much out there on it. But there was an
Operation mocking Bird.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
And this goes back.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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
isual security information was leaking. And the person who authorized
this bugging of journalists was none other than Robert Kennedy. So, yeah,
(26:11):
telling him to do it. And yet this is but
it sounds cool, well appupation Mockingbird, but yeah, look into it.
It's actually there's like way less there.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Than meets theater.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Robert Kennedy was so into covert action. He authorised 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 a classified need to know papers and the people
down there who I spoke to yelled at it. What
(26:43):
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 cann undo the enmity that came out
(27:05):
for the Agency in the seventies with the church stuff.
That's that's still faced with a lot of people, right.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And I don't want to speak ill of the Kennedys
here either. 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
(27:33):
arguably I don't even think I was build a better
for your world if they were willing to get their
hands dirty.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Yeah, that's basically there was the Cold War hysteria. But
I will say the CIA guys who orchestrated the Bay
of Pigs told me that it was more than that.
They said the Kennedies personally had it in for Pidel.
It was a personal thing because they lost to him
after the at the Bay of Pigs, and Fidel spent
months traveling the world and making fun of the camp
(28:00):
and he's calling 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 1 (28:19):
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 Vassilinko. 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 who arrested in
twenty ten, Russian legals wasss than twenty ten, and all
(28:40):
these other kind of things. It's all these people that
are in your book, Jack Platt, James, Mike Rochford, Paul Redmond,
They're all I was all worked very closely with them.
So I was really impressed with that.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
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 affects you. 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 I said, sounds interesting because I
(29:13):
knew a little bit about it and I signed on
to it. But yeah, I work real 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 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
(29:34):
release their names because Oliver Stone wants you to. It's
inside it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
I've said this many times, probably even on this podcast.
The bulk of the classified information that the CIA 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,
(30:00):
a good relationship with you. You've helped us on things.
Let me tell you what's happening here.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
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 (30:13):
I'm aware of this one story.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
There was a European country and after nine to eleven,
in an interview, one of their ministers says, oh, yeah,
that happened in the United States, but we're Europe and
this isn't going to happen here, and we're 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
(30:37):
terrorist connections are who would attack the United States or
kill Americans or Israelis and Jews. And the local people
at this embassy are like, we don't know about this list,
and the government says, basically, oh, he misspoke.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
The minister did, but I'll tell you.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Within within a week we had three or four copies
of the list, not from spies, but from people who
couldn't live with themselves, 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. They're not our spies. If you
try to give them like twenty bucks there after, they'd
(31:14):
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 4 (31:21):
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 2 (31:31):
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 Rabbiser priest, but we did talk to lawyers
off friggin' life and the fact that lawyers were on everything.
(31:53):
Am I going to go to tell me I'm not
going to go to jail for this?
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Right? Wow?
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:57):
So I'm just looking forward if I'm 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. First of all,
I'm going to go to a lawyer, and second of all,
(32:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Cuba and then finding a Cold war.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
So taking over Greenland, there's going to be some lawyers
who have some really difficult conversations. They go to the
they talk to officers that look to the law bards.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
It's like, because presidents can't order illegal things.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
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 kings the laws.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, that's true. So what is it you're working on now?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Well, just helping the screenwriter. You know, our book Best
of Enemies got options and we got really a great
company 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 3 (33:13):
It's been great, it really has. I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Oh well, thank you so much. Appreciate. I had a
good time, pleasure talking to you guys, and I can't
wait to keep talking to you, as is my.
Speaker 7 (33:22):
Wont Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea,
John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
Mission Implausible it is a production of Honorable Mention and
Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
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 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. 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 Fidel Castro, gangsters,
the FBI, CIA, and so, Gus, g it's great to
have you with us today.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
Oh, it's pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You're sort of one of these people that has dug
into everything related to mart 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 (00:58):
Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And you've written some You've read 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 4 (01:07):
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
(01:29):
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 the generation that the CIA
is the source of all evil. And I think we
all might agree that those operations were almost entirely the
brainch out of the white houses that were around, whether
(01:49):
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. Do you
really look at it hard? What they go back to
is a phrase that President Kennedy allegedly said after the
(02:10):
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
one 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 said it,
(02:32):
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 ivoyed and got an internal
CIA report of their relationship with all presidential administrations, and
by far the best relationship they had was with JFK.
(02:55):
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 the 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 Dulles offered
his resignation after the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy turned
(03:18):
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, but please stay on.
He offered three times to resign. Finally, in the fall,
four or five months after the Bad Pigs, Kennedy said,
(03:39):
I guess you should go because the heat is getting
too much. But thank you, you've been great. He stayed
close friends with Dallan Dallas, as did Robert Kennedy. We
have all the letters back and forth between them. One
of the most telling things is that when LBJ set
up the Warrant Commission, it was Robert Kennedy who pretty
much demanded that Johnson put Dulles on on the warrant commission.
(04:01):
He was like an uncle to the book, to the
Kennedy brothers, and against that they have this one alleged quote.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
If Kennedy was going to rip the CIA in one
thousand pieces, replace it with something else, replace personnel as
a There'd be paperwork involved in that right from Kennedy's 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 (04:27):
Going to file through.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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 (04:34):
There's no evidence of any of that.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
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. Is that true?
Speaker 4 (04:55):
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 that the Soviets at the time came up with,
The CIA created aids, 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
(05:17):
published 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 1 (05:34):
Well, Russian intelligences conspired to say what can we do
to create a price grotory and put it into their systems.
So 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
(05:55):
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
(06:18):
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 4 (06:28):
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 reported that back to Johnson and that
sort of put that away for the government. We knew
(06:49):
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 say 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
(07:09):
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
year dredging up embassy sources who were there when Oswald
(07:33):
was there for us, and we learned a lot. And
by the way, I interviewed during Thesenko for a documentary
I did with Peter Jennings probably twenty years ago. When
I did a show with Crouplind 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
a big budget. Our senior producer, Mike Sullivan, said, let's
(07:55):
find out first if Oswald pulled the trigger, let's see
who shot him first, and we could work back words
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. I was
waldfire all the shots, and then it became a lot
easier to see who he was connected to, which was nobody,
and we went We really worked hard. We tried to
(08:17):
do the due diligence and it just didn't hang up.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Hold up.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
He was the ultimate loaner, no doubt about it.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I think that's why conspiracies getting 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 4 (08:33):
And Lee Harvey Alliswall 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
up with this ballistic stuff forever. But I'd just say
(08:55):
that this was an easy shot. People who say it
was a hard shot, I asked him, and 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 2 (09:15):
In a 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
dupe and a stooge of the Russians.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Of the CIA.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
It certainly possibly he could have mentioned this too while
he was in Mexican talking to the Soviets.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
A low level guy would write it up and send
it in in the KGB archives.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Or he could have told Cuban intelligence officers when he's
down there, I'm going to get Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Which does exactly what he said. It's exactly what he said.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah. So for us though, it's is there proof?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
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 (09:57):
Right. When the Warren.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Report 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 of 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
(10:21):
Agency officers, analysts who Johnny and I know some of them.
They were pretty darn sure that there was WMD in Iraq, right,
I mean they Saddam said he had it. There was
reporting that it was there. He had it in the past,
He's threatened to use it. But we didn't have proof
that it was there. We just were like pretty sure.
(10:44):
And so same for the Warren report.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Weld under the second, Well, we take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
And we're back.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
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 Warrant Commission was formed, he instructed the FBI
to not investigate Mexico City. He was afraid of where
(11:26):
it might lead. 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 not leave
your room, don't talk to anybody while the trail was hot.
(11:47):
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 out
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, which was right at
the front of Johnson's mind. The crisis had just happened,
(12:08):
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 Dulls, his family friend,
on the Warren Commission. Dulles knew about the plots that
(12:29):
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 and the Warren
Commission attorneys that I've interviewed said when they found out
(12:53):
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 favorite of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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 where we should still look into.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
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
(13:45):
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
(14:06):
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,
(14:26):
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 him money, and they told us in
(14:47):
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 herod 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
(15:07):
to get a Castro for two years. I don't know
if you know Brian Ltel, former CIA officer. He ran
the Cuba desk for the agency in the eighties, and
they told Brian that well. 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
(15:28):
the 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 happen, and I want to be the
first to note from Fidel. So the word got to
(15:49):
him that something might happen in Texas and he wanted
to know immediately. And I believe this got back to
Johnson this kind of stuff because he was in touch with,
mixed 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
(16:11):
the wrong people, and that this gets out, it's all
gonna blow up. And Johnson just said, I'm not going there.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And CIA, we have something called duty to warn.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
It's a law, and.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
If we know about an assassination attempt coming up against
a foreign official, even an unfriendly one, we are honor
not honored, we are legally bound.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
To tell them this.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Now, 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 advansaer 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. I sat down,
his bodyguards were there and I said, look, but you
know who I am.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I'm the with CIA and does a plot to kill you?
Speaker 2 (16:54):
And he laughed because in their you know, this authoritarian government,
they would never do this, and he laughed at me,
but he did increase his security. So they know the Russian,
the Russians of the Cubans wouldn't do.
Speaker 4 (17:08):
That, 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
(17:30):
we I only had one source on that, so I
didn't put it in my book, but I believe him.
He said Oswald was on his way to rendezvous with
the Russians when Officer Tippitt stopped him. And remember he
shot Officer Tippet. Most people forget about that, poor guy
he shot four times point blank by Oswald. So tippittt
may have stopped at rendezvous and the furthest extension of
(17:50):
that story is he said, we told Oswald would fly
him to Havana if he pulled this off, and he said,
but we weren't going to do that I said, what
were you going to do? So we're going to dump
him into the Gulf of mexic Co.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So we've talked a little bit about this, about the
CIA is 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
(18:21):
into the intelligen 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
(18:42):
smoking gun and what hasn't been put out?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Oh, 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,
understand that everything has been released. What these people are
talking about are cleaner versions of some of these pages.
(19:07):
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 smoking gun.
(19:28):
It's gonna 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, and we'll protect you if you talk
to us. You can't just change your mind fifty years
(19:49):
later and say, well, under the pressure of Oliver Stone,
we're going to release your name. I have seen some
of the redactions they've let out, and it's terrible. Names
of agents of the sources organiz his 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
who looked at this in the nineties saw everything. It's
(20:11):
gonna be so anti climactic, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
I'm gonna 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 know, Like, give
me your sense of the Oliver Stones JFK movie and
where that conspiracy theory story came from.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
I was there when he filmed it. This was in
the around nineteen ninety. He contacted me because he knew
that I knew where all the sources worked. 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 and I
meet with him. I didn't know he was going to
go after Jim Garrison at the time, so I said, oh, yeah,
(21:02):
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
(21:26):
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 won a bunch of Academy Awards. Now I had
(21:48):
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 das. 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 Clay
(22:11):
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
(22:33):
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 2 (22:52):
RFK Junior said, and I haven't looked into this that deeply,
but he has said he suspects that CIA was involved
in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
There's a six fear cutter up.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
You know.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
The war information was run by Alan Dallas, who was
ahead of the CIA, who my uncle fired because I
was founding. Yeah, it was a plot, it was a conspiracy.
There were multiple people involved.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Why do you think this is this has come up,
why he still believes it's now and what are the
conspiracy theories on this one?
Speaker 4 (23:29):
First, I'm not at the expert in RFK. I know
some things about it peripherally. But where that seems to
come from is Srahan 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.
He wrote it over and over again, and they said
he's a Manchurian candidate. Again, no evidence, it just it's
(23:50):
just a convenient thing. There's no link to him in
the CIA. And he also ballistically he did it, but
it's just people want and he says 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 uh, they buy into
(24:12):
this RFK. You know he's into a lot 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
(24:34):
that seemed to be on the 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 1 (24:49):
It's I don't know, if anything, they probably he Kennedy's
like Eisenhower before and probably pushed the CIA to do
too much. It is too It was too handy and
easy to get things done in secret by the CIA,
rather than go through the whole political process and get
people on board.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
I've got a great quote from Robert Kennedy and from JFK,
two great quotes from them. Just before 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 in the agency were
(25:26):
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 2 (25:40):
He's gone on about something called Operation mocking Bird. There's
not much out there on it. But there was an
Operation mocking Bird.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
And this goes back.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
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
isual security information was leaking. And the person who authorized
this bugging of journalists was none other than Robert Kennedy. So, yeah,
(26:11):
telling him to do it. And yet this is but
it sounds cool, well appupation Mockingbird, but yeah, look into it.
It's actually there's like way less there.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Than meets theater.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Robert Kennedy was so into covert action. He authorised 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 a classified need to know papers and the people
down there who I spoke to yelled at it. What
(26:43):
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 cann undo the enmity that came out
(27:05):
for the Agency in the seventies with the church stuff.
That's that's still faced with a lot of people, right.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And I don't want to speak ill of the Kennedys
here either. 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
(27:33):
arguably I don't even think I was build a better
for your world if they were willing to get their
hands dirty.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
Yeah, that's basically there was the Cold War hysteria. But
I will say the CIA guys who orchestrated the Bay
of Pigs told me that it was more than that.
They said the Kennedies personally had it in for Pidel.
It was a personal thing because they lost to him
after the at the Bay of Pigs, and Fidel spent
months traveling the world and making fun of the camp
(28:00):
and he's calling 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 1 (28:19):
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 Vassilinko. 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 who arrested in
twenty ten, Russian legals wasss than twenty ten, and all
(28:40):
these other kind of things. It's all these people that
are in your book, Jack Platt, James, Mike Rochford, Paul Redmond,
They're all I was all worked very closely with them.
So I was really impressed with that.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
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 affects you. 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 I said, sounds interesting because I
(29:13):
knew a little bit about it and I signed on
to it. But yeah, I work real 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 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
(29:34):
release their names because Oliver Stone wants you to. It's
inside it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
I've said this many times, probably even on this podcast.
The bulk of the classified information that the CIA 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,
(30:00):
a good relationship with you. You've helped us on things.
Let me tell you what's happening here.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
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 (30:13):
I'm aware of this one story.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
There was a European country and after nine to eleven,
in an interview, one of their ministers says, oh, yeah,
that happened in the United States, but we're Europe and
this isn't going to happen here, and we're 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
(30:37):
terrorist connections are who would attack the United States or
kill Americans or Israelis and Jews. And the local people
at this embassy are like, we don't know about this list,
and the government says, basically, oh, he misspoke.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
The minister did, but I'll tell you.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Within within a week we had three or four copies
of the list, not from spies, but from people who
couldn't live with themselves, 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. They're not our spies. If you
try to give them like twenty bucks there after, they'd
(31:14):
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 4 (31:21):
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 2 (31:31):
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 Rabbiser priest, but we did talk to lawyers
off friggin' life and the fact that lawyers were on everything.
(31:53):
Am I going to go to tell me I'm not
going to go to jail for this?
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Right? Wow?
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:57):
So I'm just looking forward if I'm 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. First of all,
I'm going to go to a lawyer, and second of all,
(32:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Cuba and then finding a Cold war.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
So taking over Greenland, there's going to be some lawyers
who have some really difficult conversations. They go to the
they talk to officers that look to the law bards.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
It's like, because presidents can't order illegal things.
Speaker 4 (32:43):
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 kings the laws.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, that's true. So what is it you're working on now?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Well, just helping the screenwriter. You know, our book Best
of Enemies got options and we got really a great
company 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 3 (33:13):
It's been great, it really has. I really enjoyed this.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Oh well, thank you so much. Appreciate. I had a
good time, pleasure talking to you guys, and I can't
wait to keep talking to you, as is my.
Speaker 7 (33:22):
Wont Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea,
John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
Mission Implausible it is 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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