Heroes and Icons podcast
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Ep. 21. Jefferson Morley, CIA author, JFK Facts on Substack expert, Mary Ferrell Foundation VP
Jefferson Morley, author and researcher, discusses his interest in the CIA and the JFK assassination. He explains that his aunt's connection to the CIA sparked his curiosity, and his reporting on the CIA's role in Central America led him to delve deeper into the agency's activities. Morley emphasizes that his books are not JFK conspiracy theories, but rather explore the CIA's involvement in the events surrounding the assassination. He also discusses the ongoing litigation to release JFK records and the lack of transparency from the CIA. The lack of corroboration and the unavailability of full testimony from key witnesses, such as Lee Bowers, hinder the investigation into the JFK assassination. However, advancements in technology, such as the internet and digital analysis, have greatly assisted in research and analysis of the assassination. The JFK collection is being digitized, allowing anyone with an internet connection to study the records. The Zapruder film and the Air Force One tape have provided new evidence and insights into the assassination. Jim Garrison, while not the original trailblazer in JFK assassination research, played a significant role in bringing attention to the inconsistencies in the official story. Movies like 'Executive Action' and 'JFK' have influenced public perception, but they are not evidence. The assassination and its aftermath have had a profound impact on government accountability, foreign policy, and public trust in the government.
Find out more about Jeff's work at: Jefferson Morley – JOURNALIST * EDITOR * AUTHOR
https://jfkfacts.substack.com/
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Main_Page.html
Follow Greg on the X: https://www.x.com/GregHeroesIcons
and check out his new website:
https://heroesandiconspodcast.com/
Greg Randolph (00:02.7)
Welcome and thank you for joining us today on the Heroes and Icons podcast. I am your host, Greg Randolph. Please find me on the X at Greg Heroes Icons as well as my new website, Heroes and Icons podcast to get updates for great shows like this and others. I'm also a featured podcaster on houstoncitybeat .com. That's a cool website for happenings in local businesses here in the Houston area, so please check them out as well. If you're enjoying the podcast, if you would please rate, share, and review the show.
I would be so appreciative. I thank you so much for doing that. We have a very special guest today. If you are a deep thinker and enjoy seeking the truth, my guest has written several riveting books about topics such as the Civil War, the Star Spangled Banner, Watergate, and three in total just about the CIA. Our Man in Mexico, Winston Scott and the Hidden Story of the CIA, The Ghost, The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.
and Scorpions Dance, The President, The Spymaster and Watergate. You can purchase signed copies of those on jeffersonmorley .com. As an editor, investigative reporter and author, Morley is a Washington -based journalist whose books tell untold stories of American power. He comments for publication and on news about the CIA, national security and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is also the editor of JFK Facts.
blog on the Substack app and he is the vice president of the nonprofit Mary Farrell Foundation, sponsor of the largest collection of searchable JFK assassination records on the internet. My guest today is bestselling author, speaker and researcher Jefferson Morley. It's a tremendous honor to have you on the show with me today sir. How are doing Jeff? How's your family?
Jeff (01:51.361)
I'm good, Greg. Thanks for having me. Thanks for that introduction.
Greg Randolph (01:56.568)
You're welcome. hope I covered a lot of things there.
Jeff (02:00.728)
Yeah.
Greg Randolph (02:02.286)
Well, Well, good. Let me just kind of start right in with the three books that you've written about the CIA. But let me ask you first about how you became interested in this particular type of research. And I read in the prologue from your book, Our Man in Mexico, that you an aunt Lorna who worked for the CIA. Is that the basis for your interest in this type of research?
Jeff (02:27.907)
Yeah.
Jeff (02:31.595)
No, you know what, Greg? I had been.
Jeff (02:37.611)
It was only when I finished that book that I learned my aunt had worked in the CIA. I when I thought back on it, I know I had been told that before, but it never occurred to me to ask her about that. I knew that she was with the CIA in Japan. And so it never occurred to me to ask. I mean, people say they can't believe that, but no, it was something that I found out. I didn't know it when I was a kid. I think I learned that.
about it when I was in college or in my 20s. I wasn't, my Aunt Lanny, that's what we called her, never lived close to us, so I didn't know her super well. But anyway, after I finished Our Man in Mexico, the story of Winston Scott, the CIA's top man in Mexico, she said, I had a boyfriend who once worked for him.
Jeff (03:34.757)
I'm blanking on the last name, Stanley something. And Stanley had been Winscott's deputy in Mexico City, which was a terrible job because Winscott wouldn't let anybody, he wouldn't share power with anybody, so his deputies never got to do anything. But it turned out my Aunt Lanny knew this guy and,
She didn't know anything about Mexico, but that was when I – that was one of the first times that I talked to her about what was it like, who did she work for, what – and so – yeah, so no, that was not something that got me that was not what got me into the world of the CIA. What got me into the world of the CIA was I was always interested in American history. I majored in American history. But all I ever wanted to do was journalism, so I never got a higher degree or anything.
But when I came to Washington and was first writing for publications, The New Republic, Harper's, The Nation, and other publications, the hot news story of the day was Central America and the civil wars in Central America. Throughout the 70s, poor people had started rebelling against the military dictatorships in those countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
And so they all had armed insurrection against these military governments, usually led by communists, and the US was backing the military dictatorships. So that was the hot news story was, should the US do this? Should we send more aid? Should we send less? Really very terrible conflicts. And in the middle of those conflicts, in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
The CIA, the role of the CIA was huge, but you couldn't talk about that. I mean, you couldn't send a question to the CIA press office. I mean, you could, but you're never going to get a good answer. I didn't have any sources in the CIA. I didn't have a security clearance. So what could I do? Well, a reporter friend of mine said, go find some retired CIA guys and get them to talk.
Jeff (05:56.387)
And if you have some declassified documents, that's best of all, because you can show them the declassified documents if they're named in them. And if it's been declassified, they'll have no problem talking about it, because the agency doesn't have a problem talking about it. So that's what I started to do. And through that, I started to meet former CIA people, and I began to get a sense of how the CIA worked and how important it was in those conflicts and in U .S. foreign policy in general. And then – so that just –
That was the seed of my interest. So I didn't get into this topic via the JFK assassination. I got into this topic via reporting on the CIA. And then that has a lot of implications for the JFK story. But that's not where I started. I started with the civil wars in Central America, and then I ran contra.
Greg Randolph (06:47.63)
Very interesting. Very interesting. let me start with or go to the books for just a bit. Tell me about our men in Mexico. How does that maybe kind of set the tone for the understanding of the intricate nature of how the CIA operates so surreptitiously and everything?
Jeff (07:08.737)
Yeah, you know, I got a call from a lawyer friend of mine and
Jeff (07:18.659)
He said, Jeff, I got a client with a, it's got a really good story. And his client was Michael Scott, the son of Wynn Scott, who had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City from 1956 to 1969. And...
Mark, my friend, was representing Michael in a FOIA lawsuit to obtain his father's manuscript. And his father had written a manuscript about his career, which had been seized by the CIA upon his death. Seized by James Angleton.
And so Mark said – and I'd heard that story about something about Wynn Scott, the Mexico City stage diva. I didn't know anything about it, but then I thought, well, this is the real – and with his son, there's the story, right? It's a human interest story. It's not history. It's son trying to find out about his father. So I wrote that story for The Washington Post. And
And I thought it was a really good story and a really good – make a really good book. And so I shopped a proposal around and nobody was interested because it wasn't a Kennedy conspiracy book. It was just a book about how the CIA worked, about one guy in the CIA who was not particularly famous. So – but years later, an academic press approached me, Kansas University Press.
And they said, do you want to write a book about Wynn Scott? And I said, sure, here's the proposal. And they said, we'll take it. So it wasn't a great advance. It wasn't a commercial advance, but it was something. And, you when it's quality press, I wanted to work with somebody who was going to do a good job. And so they did a great job in putting together, fact checking it, editing it, peer review, you know, had to run it by people who were in the subject. And so it tells the story.
Jeff (09:10.933)
of this extraordinary man. And there's a couple of things that are extraordinary about it. First of all, we hear often that the early days the CIA is thought of as very Ivy League, know, elitist type institution. But there was one person who said, you know, the CIA was half composed of scions of the Ivy League and half of men who were one generation from the plow.
And I thought that was a nice expression, one generation from the plow. That was when Scott, his dad worked on a strip of railroad in rural Alabama. He grew up in a boxcar. mean, he grew up under very humble circumstances, but he was very smart. He went to University of Alabama. He went to University of Michigan, got a PhD in mathematics, became an FBI agent, and that led him to the CIA. So he was an extraordinarily interesting character that way.
And then he served in Mexico as station chief for 13 years. you know, a station chief is the CIA's top person in a country, right? So typically, the CIA will leave, a station chief will serve no more than three or four years in any given place, because you just want fresh blood in there. You don't want to be trapped by somebody's sources.
The longer you stay there, the more likely you are to be penetrated by the enemy, et cetera, et cetera. And when Scott hung onto his job in one place for 13 years, so that was very almost unprecedented in the history of the CIA. So even within the CIA, he was something of a remarkable character. Now, that became my modus operandi. Now, I was well acquainted with the JFK story and
I wrote the Wynn Scott story. And one of the reasons I never sold it was because I talked all about Wynn Scott and JFK. And the editors were like, well, who killed JFK? And I said, I don't know. I said, well, tell us. I said, well, I can't put that in this book. It's like I couldn't construct a JFK conspiracy theory and embed it in the story of Wynn Scott. And I didn't know who killed Kennedy. I still don't know who killed Kennedy. So that's why the book didn't sell.
Jeff (11:28.801)
I think that detached approach is actually what makes the book really interesting. Because who cares what I think about who killed Kennedy? That's not an interesting question. More or less just another jerk who's walking along with an opinion. Who cares? But what did Wynn Scott think about who killed JFK? That's a really interesting question because he's a really consequential guy. He was a station chief in Mexico, powerful guy, well respected in the CIA.
And he had the front row seat on this character named Lee Harvey Oswald, who comes strolling through multiple CIA surveillance operations doing what, exactly? And so what Wynn Scott thought of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, that's really interesting, and that's the kind of way where I want to point people to in understanding the story, because that's how I understand it. I don't understand it because I'm a smart guy and I figured out a conspiracy theory, and I'm going to sell it to you.
No thanks. I'm not that smart or I'm not that dumb. I just don't want to do that. But I can point out the factual circumstances, the real -world circumstances in which the assassination took place and what the people who were closest to those events and knew the most about them.
That's really interesting. And so our man in Mexico started with that premise and the ghost, the story of James Angleton, a good friend of Wynn Scott's and the man who seized his manuscript after his death, that was, I took the same approach.
Greg Randolph (13:07.95)
You take that.
Jeff (13:09.527)
No, and.
Jeff (13:14.711)
So, yeah, what did Jim Angleton think about the assassination? And so the interesting part about the Angleton book is not only did he seize Winscott's manuscript, but he's also the guy who controlled the CIA's file on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was the person at the CIA who was the most interested in Oswald. And if the official story's true, that one man alone killed the president for no reason, you know,
If that's true, then Jim Angleton should have lost his job after November 22nd because he had been watching that guy for four years and had plenty of indications of his politics, his personal life. He knew a lot about him. And the ghost tells that story. And again, it's not a JFK conspiracy book and I don't tell you who killed JFK. I don't say Jim Angleton.
had to do it, but I tell you exactly what we know for sure about what he did. And since then, I've become more
Jeff (14:30.403)
I think Angleton's responsibility for the assassination is large, whether it was inadvertent or advertent. That's a key question, maybe the key question. And then Scorpion's Dance, the third book in which this is a trilogy of spies, Wyn Scott, Jim Angleton, and then the third spy is Richard Helms, who was also friends with Wyn Scott and Jim Angleton.
long time good friends with them and was the deputy director and director of the CIA. So that book really focuses on Helms's relationship with Richard Nixon. It's not a biography like the other two. I I didn't talk a lot about Helms growing up or his early years, but rather about his relationship with Nixon because that's the most relevant one to the Kennedy assassination.
Vietnam policy, Cuba policy, Watergate, know, kind of those, some of the key issues of the 60s and 70s are all reflected in that story in Scorpion's dance. So the trilogy of spies, you know, the JFK story resonates in every, each of those books without solving the crime, but just kind of describing what it looked like and its impact both.
at the time, and then I think Scorpion's dance is especially interesting on how the JFK assassination resonated in the relationship between director of central intelligence, Dick Helms, and the president, Dick Nixon. So, you know, my work on JFK is really rooted in that study of the CIA and its personalities and is grounded in that.
And then JFK facts on Substack, my blog is more of a, to promote a good conversation about the evidence in the Kennedy assassination, what does it tell us, and to keep a light, shining a light on what we don't know, what we have learned most recently. So, you know, I tell people, know, when people, say, who killed JFK? You know, I don't know.
Greg Randolph (16:43.213)
Mm
Jeff (16:54.281)
And a lot of people aren't satisfied with that. And it's a little coy, but I truly don't know. I mean, I think the President was killed by his enemies in his government. I think there's a lot of evidence of that, and I think we know who might have done it. But if the President's assassination was the work of a covert operation, the people who were responsible would have made sure not only that nothing was on paper, but that they could plausibly deny involvement.
That's the whole point of the CIA, is that you have a clandestine service that will do things that the U .S. Government can plausibly deny involvement in. So the CIA had plausible deniability around Kennedy's assassination for a long time. I think what's changed in the last 20 years, and our news media hasn't caught up to this, is that deniability is no longer plausible. All they have now is implausible deniability.
And so that tells us something, but it doesn't tell us who killed Kennedy. So anyway, that's kind of how – where my books came from, which is really the frame for how I do journalism and how I think about the JFK's story. So you've got a lot of questions, but that's a good way to frame whatever your questions are.
Greg Randolph (18:13.174)
Sure. Well, sure. you were, Jeff, you were also mentioned in a different book called The Devil's Chessboard, which maybe focuses more on former CIA director Alan Dulles. So my question with that one is, I mean, and just all of this really is, does the CIA have an ultimate end game? then how did they...
How did they come to power from the further back, like the 50s and 60s and even further back than that?
Jeff (18:48.163)
Yeah, you know, I taught a class in the history of the CIA and I realized it's really important topic and it should be taught. So let's get some kind of basic history. So in 1942, the U .S. was going to war in Europe.
And Franklin Roosevelt wanted, was going to, we were going to invade and retake, but we had to muster an army and we had to take measure up the enemy. And FDR was persuaded by a man named Bill Donovan, who had been a fighter pilot in World War I and was a Wall Street lawyer with a lot of contacts in England.
And Donovan said, you need to create an intelligence service in Europe, so to prepare the way for the invasion. that's kind of the tip of the spear. people, you're gonna want to, you're gonna have trucks and tanks, and you're gonna want to know how to travel and how to make contact and what kind of people live where in Europe. And so,
Roosevelt created something called the Office of Strategic Services, and that was America's first foreign intelligence agency. And it was created to support the Allied armies as they fought in, first in France and in Italy and then in Germany. So the OSS recruited people, and the OSS was trained by the British intelligence service, the SIS, Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. And so,
That's where Americans began to learn these foreign intelligence techniques. And so the OSS did paramilitary warfare. They parachuted behind enemy lines. They recruited spies. They forged documents. They smuggled things, all the things that you want a foreign intelligence agency to do. After the war ended, Harry Truman abolished the OSS, and he said, we don't want an American Gestapo.
Jeff (20:52.351)
One of the lessons of the war was that the German dictatorship, a key feature was the Gestapo, an intelligence agency that rode herd on the population and controlled so that the Nazis were never challenged in their power. So Truman didn't like the idea of a peacetime intelligence service. A wartime was fine, but not peacetime. And so he abolished it. Two years later, he changed his mind and
What had happened was the Cold War started in 1945 and the two winning powers of World War II, as soon as Nazi Germany was defeated, looked at each other and realized they were now in contest for control of the world. Soviet Union, we're communists, we're Marxists, we have a science of politics, we're gonna liberate the working people and march into a glorious future.
And the U .S. was, we're democratic, we're capitalist, we're an open society, this is the only way to go, we have to fight the communists. So communists and USSR are immediately become hostile to each other. And two years later, as conflicts are breaking out all over Europe between the forces of the allies and the forces of the communists,
that Truman decided he wanted an intelligence service. And that's when the CIA was created. And it was specifically endowed in its opening legislation with very vague clauses, but the men who wrote these clauses knew what they meant. And they were basically for other activities, which meant covert activities. And so the CIA was given the power from its charter in 1947
to break the law. That's what an intelligence agency does, and to mount covert action operations, so – to collect intelligence and to support allies in the same thing. And the CIA grew very rapidly as the confrontation with Russia deepened in the 50s. Very – two confident nuclear superpowers confronting each other aggressively. World's living on a hair trigger.
Jeff (23:16.067)
in a lot of ways. And the CIA becomes a tool that President Eisenhower especially appreciated, and that you could achieve U .S. foreign policy goals, get rid of an unfriendly government, without going to war. And so Roosevelt, mean Eisenhower didn't want to go to war, and as a general stayed out of wars, but he liked the CIA. And so the CIA grew and it was popular. so,
Jeff (23:45.539)
And until the Bay of Pigs, until 1961, it really was, you know, it got free rein in the Washington, in all the press. know, nobody wanted to know what the CIA did, but they were good guys, they were our good guys, whatever they did was good, and know, good hurray for us, down with the commies. The failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs created the first rupture between the agency and the president, and the presidency, the first one in 15 years.
Truman had liked the CIA, although they failed to warn him that the Korean War was coming. But Truman and Eisenhower liked the CIA, and Congress loved the CIA, and they had unlimited budgets, and they could do whatever they wanted. And that kind of power soon bred corruption. In the mid -1950s, Jim Angleton takes over a Defense Department program.
to spy on servicemen, to read the mail of servicemen suspected of passing secrets or selling secrets. And they were opening a couple hundred letters a year. Angleton takes over that program, moves it to the CIA, and pretty soon they're opening 8 ,000 letters a year. And there's no due process here. There's no probable cause. It's just we don't like the way these people think. They were critics of U .S. policy, civil rights leaders.
who were regarded as subversive, and so that the CIA is already spying on them in the 50s. And the FBI is doing the same thing with the COINTEL program. So the CIA, you know, it grows rapidly. Now, Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, didn't trust the CIA, and he talked about breaking them up, and he even had Dick Goodwin write a plan about reorganizing the CIA and how they might do it.
Kennedy eventually decided not to do it. would have been politically costly. So he didn't do it. And I think this is where the Kennedy assassination is really important because if we had a real investigation of Kennedy's assassination and real accountability, the CIA would have been sanctioned. If we take the CIA's story, which I think is a cover story of a lone gunman,
Jeff (26:11.765)
even if we take that at its face value, even if that's what happened, the agency's behavior was so atrocious that it was really negligent if Oswald alone killed the president. So let's assume that story's true. The CIA was atrocious. And in fact, it's probably much worse than that, that CIA people seem to have connived in Kennedy's death. But we didn't have any accountability. so the CIA and
You know, it's not the CIA alone. It's what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, what some people now call the deep state. We can argue about those terms, but if what we're talking about is secretive U .S. government agencies created after World War II, you know, that's a big sector of the government. CIA is probably the biggest agency in there, $15 billion a year agency, but NSA is probably
as big as that $10 $15 billion a year. And there's a host of other secret government intelligence agencies which have powers of secrecy. They don't all have law -breaking powers the way the CIA has, but their budgets are secret, their activities are secret. You and I can't go in and find out about what goes on at those agencies. Our congressmen probably could if they put their mind to it. But there's a big sector of the government, and it's that sector of the government that was created.
by the 1947 National Security Act, which created the CIA and the NSA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So I think it's really important to understand the Kennedy assassination in that context of the growth of the secret agencies after World War II and what were the results of that.
Greg Randolph (28:01.39)
As far as the transparency with the CIA releasing documents related to JFK, there's some recent litigation with Discovery on some things with the Mary Farrell Foundation. Where does that currently stand?
Jeff (28:18.563)
Yeah, so the Mary Farrell Foundation sued President Biden and the National Archives for failure to enforce the JFK Records Act. know, if the JFK Records Act was in effect, all these documents would have been made public in 2017. And Trump didn't do it in 2017 and Biden didn't do it in 2021. So, you know, that was clearly not what Congress intended. Congress was very clear they wanted a strong bill.
And so we sued. And one of the things that we allege is that the Review Board was forwarded in its work by government agencies, and it was up it was the duty of the National Archives and the President to enforce that law it's still in effect – and secure the release of the latest records. So the judge said, the President has discretion to do that. So he threw out that part of the case. But he said that
we could litigate about things that had been documented by the JFK review board in the 1990s, where they didn't get the documents they wanted or the documents they wanted were destroyed. So we are seeking, now that we have a path to litigation, we're seeking to the, compel the government to explain and produce some records that were supposed to be produced and never were.
to explain why some records were destroyed, which the review board asked for and never got. That was the Secret Service in particular, with the CIA asking them to produce the personnel file of George Joannides, an undercover officer who was involved in events leading to the assassination and the surveillance of Oswald. So we're – it's not a fishing expedition. We're very specifically looking for things that are known to exist or known to have existed at one point.
and get some accountability. So we have a status conference with the judge next month and we'll find out what we – what the government will have to do and what we will be able to do in order to pursue this. So that's exciting, because if we get discovery, then we can compel testimony and we can really get some explanations for some things that were very suspicious.
Jeff (30:44.163)
And, you know, we might, we will definitely, if we get discovery, we will definitely find out new things about the JFK files that we didn't know before.
Greg Randolph (30:55.551)
Is there any real concern about any type of national security on the CIA's part if things are released and how they operate and those things?
Jeff (31:06.529)
Yeah, you know, it's a good question. It's a good question, Greg. We have a lot of these documents and so, you know, much of the document might be declassified and so it will only be a sentence or a paragraph. So we can tell from those, from the context of those documents, what they're withholding. And it's a variety of things. I mean, a lot of it, there's no national security. It's embarrassing to the CIA, you know.
There's one passage which is still redacted which concerns a covert operation in Indonesia where they were gonna create a fake pornographic film of the leader of the country as a way of discrediting him. And so there's no national security secret there. The CIA just doesn't want to admit, doesn't want it in writing, you know, one of the stupid, you know, tricky, dirty tricks that they were involved in. So.
That's just public relations part on part of the CIA. And there's no justification for that. And that's part of the lawsuit. Take that off. That's ridiculous. There's no, there's no legal justification for that. So then there's other things where you can tell that it involves, you know, some arrangement with say the Mexican government about the location of surveillance cameras or the existence of a spy.
as a political politician's office. So there's some stuff there that you could say has some national security value on the theory that if it was exposed, that would disrupt foreign relations with Mexico today, and that would harm the US. These arguments, they're very, very tenuous, and in their own way, they're kind of crazy. They're kind of paranoid. This disclosure of this won't harm relations between
US and Mexico. These are two governments of huge countries that have big problems. Some historical detail from 60 years ago is not going to have a major effect at all. That's just an excuse. But they use these excuses to then hide things that are really germane and central to the JFK assassination, like some of the things I mentioned before, Secret Service records, CIA records. So the way I put it is,
Jeff (33:33.239)
We're looking for a needle in a haystack. So the CIA tries to keep the haystack very big, right? Because that makes the needle harder to find. We're trying to shrink this haystack so that the needle is easier to find. So yeah, that's where it stands right now. it's positive development. We're looking forward to discovery.
Greg Randolph (33:54.498)
Very good. Very good. Well, I can't wait to see what comes of that and we'll hope for the best. Let me ask you, I have some JFK questions here, it's such an intricate subject that it's hard to almost ask one thing and then not ask a thousand other things after that. So I just do to the nature of it. But let me ask you just kind of generally because
Jeff (33:57.186)
Yeah.
Jeff (34:16.791)
Yeah.
Greg Randolph (34:23.488)
It seems like there have been several individuals that are the self -admitted assassin or the second gunman on the grassy knoll or they took the fatal shot or whatever it might be that they're alleging that they did. How much credit do we or credence do we give to somebody like a James Files that I had previously asked you about?
Jeff (34:50.145)
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a good question. So I want to say the first thing is, you know, who the gunmen were in in Dealey Plaza, if there were any besides Lee Oswald and or if Lee Oswald was one of them.
Jeff (35:11.283)
It's a very interesting question, but it's not a question that's essential to solving the question of what caused and who caused the assassination, right? So that's the first thing. So it's a really interesting question, but the fact that I'm not gonna give you a very satisfactory answer, I don't think.
is no detriment to what I'm trying to say about the bigger picture of the assassination. Here's what I think about the Dealey Plaza gunman. And this came up in a very concrete way in Rob Reiner's excellent podcast last fall.
who killed JFK, which I appear on in several incidents, several episodes. And I thought it was, in general, it was really good. The only episode that I didn't like was the last one where they talked about Dealey Plaza gunmen and they said that there were four gunmen and who they were. I didn't buy any of that because I don't think that we have conclusive evidence on any of these people. Now,
We have some people who are named a lot, okay? And you mentioned James Files, okay? James Files was a career criminal, served a long prison term, and when he was in prison said, I was the guy who fired from the grassy knoll, I worked with the CIA, this, that, and the other thing. I read.
know, files his statement. I know he's said some things since then and I have not followed up and should. But I felt like
Greg Randolph (36:49.251)
you
Jeff (36:54.935)
Files could have said everything he was saying based on a thorough reading of the JFK literature and maybe some experience with some of the people involved in it. So, you know, I couldn't be sure he wasn't making it up. So what's the corroboration? The strongest thing he had going for him was that the FBI agent who worked on his case believed him.
So that was a form of corroboration, not that he knew about it at the time, but that he believed Files. But that's the only corroboration I ever had, and Files' name never comes up in my CIA work. Interviewed a lot of people who worked for the CIA in early 60s in South Florida. His name never came up. So I just – there's not enough corroboration. Could it have been him? Yeah, maybe. I'm not saying it wasn't.
There's another guy named Suetra, a Corsican, who's mentioned a lot. He was deported on November 22nd. If you think about it, that would be an elegant way to get a criminal out of the country, would be to deport them, right? Because that's what people do, would be very normal. And there's some people who said that he was there.
Jeff (38:18.807)
But again, a lack of corroboration. Is there anything in the documentary record that supports it? Is there anything in any of the investigations that supports it? There's just not enough evidence to say. The one that I think is the most interesting story and I think is the best corroborated is the man named Erminio Diaz, who was a
a sharpshooter, definitely, an assassin. And what's interesting about Herminio Diaz is he never said that he was a Dealey Plaza gunman, but his friends believed it. And not just like friends who knew him in different ways. And...
So I think there's the most corroboration around Erminio Diaz. So I'd say he's the most interesting subject, suspect, but I wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't say he was the guy on the grassy hill. I don't know who was. So that's how I think about those stories. I need corroboration. Could, you know, I'm not going to argue with somebody say, you know, I mean, I should check out files of story more, but that's my, you
Greg Randolph (39:23.694)
Sure.
Jeff (39:32.1)
That's my reaction to those guys. And I think that since, you know,
Jeff (39:39.383)
No corroboration. As a reporter, where would I go? How would I learn more about it? Every trail has been pursued to its end, as far as I can tell. And is there somebody else out there who would know? It doesn't seem worth it to me. There's other more profitable ways to investigate the causes of Kennedy's assassination.
Greg Randolph (40:05.834)
It's a shame that we didn't get full testimony or testimony just in general from a lot of different people. And the one that really stands out to me is Lee Bowers that had a view of everything from behind the parking lot and the.
and the fence and everything else because in just the initial description that he gave that I saw that was not the full one that he told to other confidants of his was that there was kind of a larger stocky man and then there was a guy in his younger to mid -20s in a plaid jacket. is that Charles Nicoletti and James Files? We don't know.
Jeff (41:01.291)
Yeah, so, you know, yeah, and then, you know, that testimony wasn't gotten. So to me, that's it's a very interesting question, but to me, it's a secondary question.
Greg Randolph (41:13.516)
Understood, understood and it's hard and like you're saying there's no way to really corroborate that. Let me ask you, let's see. What do you think about some of the advances in technology since the assassination took place? How greatly have those assisted in research and everything since then?
Jeff (41:22.285)
Yeah.
Jeff (41:44.439)
Well, mean, hugely, and I think this is something that is underappreciated.
Jeff (41:55.779)
With the arrival of the internet and digital networks and large -scale databases, searchable databases, the gatekeepers to the JFK story have been eliminated. From 1963 to 2000, access to the records of the East Asia nation was...
was tightly controlled. I mean, you could get to it if you went to the National Archives, but as far as the newspaper, writing about it in newspapers, that was controlled by a small group of editors. And it was very difficult for people to get to the basic source material of the story. Well, that's not true anymore. The Mary Farrell Foundation has about...
a quarter to a third of the JFK collection in the National Archives online. And the whole JFK collection is going to be digitized in the next five years, according to the archives. So anybody with an internet connection anywhere will be able to study this. So we're going to get a lot higher quality of analysis the more people look at this over the years. So...
Greg Randolph (42:50.563)
you
Jeff (43:11.821)
So that's going to have a huge effect on how people understand this issue. And I think that we're going to get to new ways of seeing and thinking about this because of it. then within that, other more narrow technological developments, improved
Digital analysis has given us an even closer look at the Zabruder film. We had new audio evidence emerge in 2011 with the Air Force One tape. And this is the tape that was made on Air Force One as it returned from Dallas and recording conversations between different components of the government responding.
Greg Randolph (43:49.122)
you
Jeff (44:08.269)
to the news of the assassination. And I had a guy do a digital analysis of that, and he pointed out that that tape has clearly been edited from a longer tape. so what we know is we still don't have the whole original tape of Air Force One coming back from Dallas. And I think that's, if that full tape ever surfaces,
That's gonna be a really interesting story and could be a mind -blowing story. So, yeah, new technology is gonna open up new perspectives on the assassination. And I think, you know, right now we can say the official story isn't true. I mean, one crazy guy didn't come along and kill the president for no reason and then another crazy guy came along and killed him because he felt like it. That's not what happened.
Lee Oswald was a figure of deep interest to highest level people in the CIA who lied constantly about what they knew about him afterwards. the fact that he said he was a patsy, the idea that he was manipulated by the CIA people who knew most about him and who were enemies of Kennedy, that case has gotten very strong in the last 20 years. And when I go on radio and TV now and talk about it, nobody argues
argues that point anymore because it's incontestable. So they say, well, that's not smoking gun proof of a conspiracy. No. But it is smoking gun proof that the official stories doesn't describe the causes of Kennedy's assassination. So – and I think that with these new technologies and availability of records and – we're going to get the last of those records one way or another, and the CIA doesn't want to cough them up, but
I think they're going to have to, then we can say something else happened and that the President was killed by his enemies and here's who it probably was. And Jim Angleton, Bill Harvey are certainly plausible suspects. Now, did they set it in motion? Did they wink? Did they – were they bystanders? That's the kind of questions we can't answer yet. But I think with the new technologies, we're going to get
Jeff (46:32.533)
closer to the causes of the assassination.
Greg Randolph (46:39.564)
Very good. Very good. Let me ask you about about Jim Garrison, the New Orleans attorney whose work attempting to bring the truth to trial was the basis for, of course, the Oliver Stone movie JFK. Was he the original trailblazer in JFK assassination research?
Jeff (46:45.016)
Yeah.
Jeff (47:01.603)
No, he wasn't. What happened was after the Warren Commission published its report, people began to read it. And then they began to look at the 26 volumes of evidence that were referred to in the footnotes of the report. And they started to look at that. And they said, this story doesn't make any sense.
Jeff (47:29.903)
And Arlen Spector's single bullet theory didn't make any sense. That didn't match up with what the doctors were saying, the autopsy doctors. And so there were all these doubts. And so people started to write books. And in 64, 65, Mark Lane, a left -wing lawyer from New York, wrote Rush to Judgment. Harold Weisberg, who was a Democratic staffer on the Hill here in Washington.
wrote Whitewash alleging that Sylvia Marr worked for the UN in New York. She wrote a very good book called Accessories After the Fact. So all these books were published 65, 66. Tink Thompson published Six Seconds in Dallas. He was the first person to forensically analyze the Zabruder film, something the Warren Commission never did. A shocking, shocking.
failure. mean, that alone is a sign that they didn't conduct a serious investigation, that there's no frame -by -frame analysis of the Zabruder film. They didn't want to watch it. They didn't describe what it showed. And so they effectively
avoided it. But anyway, all of these things were in the air, 64, 65, 66, and journalists themselves were coming around. Life magazine, the photo magazine, one of the most popular magazines in the country.
called for a new investigation in 1966. Look, which was a similar glossy big circulation magazine, same thing, called for a new investigation. So there was a lot floating around in the air there, and the government was like, there's nothing to it, crazy conspiracy theorists. That's when people started to dismiss them. Garrison was a trailblazer in that he tried to do something about it officially with a government mechanism, government investigation. The problem, mean, Garrison had a lot of problems.
Greg Randolph (49:17.922)
Okay.
Jeff (49:23.851)
He didn't know how the CIA worked. He didn't really have, he smelled a rat, but he didn't really have good witnesses. David Ferry, the guy who he really wanted to talk, died right before the trial, or as the trial began, and people speculated about that. So, Garrison kind of went in, like with a prosecutor's approach, like let's arrest some low -level people and flip them and get them to talk about where this thing really came from.
Garrison did a lot of good work. I think he was on the right track, but he didn't know how the CIA worked and the CIA launched a very sophisticated covert operation to thwart him, which was run by Jim Garrison. So he was, you know, he was spied upon. He was penetrated and he was manipulated and blocked at every turn himself. you know, he discredited JFK investigations because
that man he charged, Clay Shaw, was immediately acquitted and Garrison was right. Clay Shaw was a high -level CIA asset. The CIA later admitted that. We've seen the document to that effect. Whether he was involved in the Kennedy assassination, Garrison didn't come close to proving that. And so Garrison was acquitted and people said, look, there's nothing to it. But Garrison developed a lot of evidence, important evidence.
and especially around the autopsy and the Zabruder film. And the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969 was the first time that the Zabruder film was shown publicly. And as Oliver Stone recreates to telling a fact in the movie.
It was only then when Dr. Fink admitted on the stand that the autopsy of President Kennedy had been controlled by the military and the doctors had been told what to do. And Fink had never said that. The Warren Commission never knew that or the public never knew that. But that was very important, that the autopsy was controlled. And now we know, really, the JFK Review Board in the 1990s interviewed a lot of the people, 15 people who were involved in the autopsy.
Jeff (51:40.415)
And it's pretty clear from their testimony, most of which had never been taken before, that the autopsy was fraudulent, that Kennedy's body had been tampered with to support the idea that he was only hit by gunfire from behind. And the doctors, you know, were coerced.
into going along with that. so, so Garrison, you know, I give Garrison credit for breaking through, for smelling a rat, for trying to do something, for emphasizing the importance of it. He was careless, he made a lot of mistakes, and he didn't have a great case. So that's kind of the ledger on Jim Garrison.
Greg Randolph (52:21.914)
I thought, let me, I just wanted to add to what you said about the Zapruder film. I thought Douglas Horne's research on that and analyzing everything else and interviewing a gentleman who was there at the time at Hawkeye Works. I thought that was a fantastic piece of research.
Jeff (52:40.259)
Yeah, no, no. And Doug really filled out the picture with that testimony and with the story of Dino Brugioni, who was the CIA's top photographic guy for 25 years. So, you know, a great, highly, highly credible source. this, you know, the story that he tells about how the CIA obtained the film and analyzed it, you know,
Greg Randolph (52:50.029)
Yes.
Jeff (53:09.947)
It just shows how carefully controlled that evidence was and how it was how the control of it was manipulated for the sake of the government. So yeah, Doug Horn's work, very important.
Greg Randolph (53:30.102)
Very much so. I'm going to throw this statistics out, statistic if I can speak, out there and there's a book called Hit List written by Richard Belzer and David Wayne and this was actually I think cited from Crossfire by Jim Mars that I'm quoting here, an actuary engaged by the London Times calculated the probability
that at least 18 witnesses would die of any cause within three years of the JFK assassination as one in 100 ,000 trillion." Unquote.
Jeff (54:12.861)
You know.
I don't, I'm not impressed by that statistic.
I mean, coincidences happen all the time. You sit down on an airplane and the person next to you has the same birthday as you. It's like, and so we can overestimate the importance and attach too much importance to coincidence. Now.
the people who died that are cited in that book.
You know, some of them were close to the case. Others, I'm not convinced were close to the case or I think there's a perfectly good explanation for their death. The important point is that three key witnesses we know for sure were murdered. Oswald, Rosselli, and Giancana. Three key people who knew about the JFK story were all murdered. So to me, you don't need to know more about that.
Greg Randolph (55:06.819)
Mm
Greg Randolph (55:14.637)
you
Jeff (55:15.809)
you know, in terms of what makes it suspicious. There's three witness deaths right there that tell you something's going on. So.
Greg Randolph (55:27.704)
There we go. Jeff, what did you think about some of the deathbed confessions of some people like E. Howard Hunt, for example, that two of his sons had put together? What do you make of those type of things?
Jeff (55:28.77)
Yeah.
Jeff (55:46.241)
Well, funny you should ask because we just published yesterday, Eric Hamburg, who conducted those interviews with St. John, St. John Hunt writes a piece about, you know, how credible is Howard Hunt. And I think he does a very good job of laying out where's Hunt's story is corroborated. And, you know, and some of the reasons why we should and other reasons why we shouldn't believe it.
So, know, Eric points out, you know, it wasn't he wasn't on his deathbed and it wasn't a confession. mean, Howard Hunt was a CIA guy in that he was very good at talking out of both sides of his mouth and changing his story to suit the circumstances. So and he's a convicted criminal and a scoundrel to boot. So, you know, you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. I think what's interesting about Howard Hunt is
This guy's a totally pro agency, right? So he's not someone who would ever impugn the CIA. He thought the CIA walked on water and he would never criticize the CIA. So when he told these stories to his son saying, know, yeah, well maybe some of these guys were involved and if they were, here's who they were. He was kind of throwing it out there in a way that he couldn't be pinned down and he wasn't involved.
So you're never quite sure whether I hunt actually telling the truth or not. Let me just have a drink here.
Jeff (57:28.88)
So that article which I published yesterday on JFK facts on Substack is pretty much reflects my thinking which is
there's reason to credit what he's talking about and that his general conception of a plot originating among CIA people opposed to JFK's policies, I think that's credible. So I think that tells us something. Now, does it tell us what Hunt's role was? No, not really. He was too shifty for that.
But I think it gets to the right crowd of people. so, somebody who was on the inside, Howard Hunt, somebody who knows the underbelly of the agency, you have to take that, story, very seriously.
Greg Randolph (58:19.822)
Understood. Jeff, what are your thoughts on some of the movies that have been made that are possibly depicting the JFK assassination? There's Executive Action from 1973. There's another one that's a little bit in line with things called The Package from 1989. then, course, JFK in 1991 from Oliver Stone. What do you make of those?
Jeff (58:48.675)
Well, Executive Action's a pretty good movie, and Donald Sutherland, who recently died – we did – in our obituary, Sutherland funded that. He made sure that that movie got made, which it might not have gotten made 10 years later in Hollywood.
So I think Mark Lane worked on that book, and that was a kind of rogue CIA plot. I think that's a leading contender. I never saw the package. People told me about it. Oliver Stone's a little bit different in that it's trying to be a little more documentary -like.
I actually think, but in terms of documentary, the book says that, or the movie implies that David Ferry set up the crossfire in Dealey Plaza. That didn't happen, that's not what happened. So it's not plausible in that way. It's not plausible as a factual scenario, it's plausible dramatically. So, but.
Jeff (01:00:06.465)
Movies have a lot of influence on how people think about these things, but movies aren't evidence. Oliver Stone's movie isn't evidence of anything. It's a long string of celluloid depicting people impersonating other people.
So I don't refer to it. It doesn't shape my thinking. It's a cool movie. It's very provocative. It's very believable. I think his scenario is basically right. But in terms of the history of what happened, it's drama. It's not history.
Greg Randolph (01:00:46.318)
Jeff, let me ask you one more question. Thank you so much for all your time this evening. How much do you think the world has changed after the JFK assassination? And how would it be different maybe if he weren't assassinated? I mean, it's tough to say, but...
Jeff (01:01:05.431)
Yeah, I mean, truth is, the thing I said before, there was no accountability for the CIA. And if there had been, that would have been a very different institution. And its clandestine power would have been checked. And that would have also, you know,
Jeff (01:01:28.137)
limited or changed that thing we call the military -industrial complex. So without accountability, I think we had a more warlike expansionistic foreign policy, more aggressive, more interventionist, involving ourselves in the affairs of other countries. So I think the assassination, the lack of accountability, that was one impact. Two, what Kennedy was trying to do
Jeff (01:01:59.442)
His policies were reversed after his death. mean, Johnson did not seek arms control with the Soviet Union.
the way Kennedy was and Kennedy would have. He wanted to expand on the test ban treaty. He thought that was his proudest accomplishment as president, which was passed in the fall of 63. So he was going to do more of that. He had twice declined to go to war to remove Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis. So he was on the path to recognizing the Castro government.
Greg Randolph (01:02:30.701)
and
Jeff (01:02:37.795)
And that would have been very different if he had done that. We're still at quasi in a state of war against this poor country for no reason. and JFK did not want to get into Vietnam, had been signaling throughout 1963, turning down a...
a lot of pressure from the Joint Chiefs to escalate the war. And that was immediately, that policy was immediately changed after his death. So, you know, I think Kennedy would have stayed out of Vietnam. He was, he believed what Charles de Gaulle told him, which was don't get involved in a land war in Asia. You will not win, you cannot win a land war in Asia.
And I think he would have made peace with Cuba. So the country could have gone in a much different direction. And the Cold War could have wound down sooner if Kennedy had survived. So I think those are the big impacts. And then there's the longer term impact of the Warren Commission. And this is, think, what's with us today, especially is
And just discrediting the government and the government insisting on a story that was not very believable at the start. And the more you looked at it, the less believable it got. And the more government lies and destruction of records. And it's just gone on and on and on.
We haven't gotten an answer to JFK, but we have gotten a crash course in don't trust the government and don't believe anything it says. And that's very pervasive now in our culture. I'm a liberal. I believe in big government. think we need an active government to have a decent society. And we don't have a basis for that because people are so hostile to the government. And there's a lot of causes to that and good and bad and anything.
Jeff (01:04:44.618)
I think the Warren Commission and the failure to resolve Kennedy's assassination.
That's a kind of festering sore in America, and I think that's where we feel its effect today. And that's why we work on this issue. It's not – I mean, we want to find out what happened, but we also want to show that this can be overcome, the secrecy, the government acting in this way. They can be held accountable, and it's really important because nothing could be more important than a
a violent removal of a leader. So those are the things I think, the impact on both policy and on kind of mood and faith in government.
Greg Randolph (01:05:38.616)
Sure. Sure. You jogged my memory with the Vietnam thing. I'll leave it here. Then we need to wrap it up. at some point, somebody pulled a, I forget what the actual acronym is, it's NSAM memo from the LBJ library to escalate what was happening in Vietnam on, but November 21st.
Jeff (01:06:02.55)
Yeah.
Greg Randolph (01:06:07.534)
1963. I'll leave that, I'll just leave that one right there because that's another, that opens up a whole other set of questions and podcasts and everything else.
Jeff (01:06:20.309)
Okay. Well, we've talked for an hour, Greg, and covered a lot of ground. Why don't we do this again?
Greg Randolph (01:06:26.019)
Yes.
Greg Randolph (01:06:31.34)
No, I would love to. I'd love to maybe ask you some different things and get an update on the discovery with the Mary Farrell Foundation and everything.
Jeff (01:06:42.625)
Okay, so I think that's going to take place on September 5th. So why don't we connect sometime next month and I can give you and your audience an update on that. And there's some things that we didn't get to in your questions so we can keep going on other aspects and dimensions of JFK. I I really like your questions because they help explain and help me explain the story, help me, you know.
express how I think about these things. So I enjoy that. And we're getting down to not too much in the weeds, but also engaging the real personalities, the real questions that researchers and people interested in the story have. So let's do it again.
Greg Randolph (01:07:31.2)
Absolutely. Let me ask you just one more, just real quick final thing. If someone up to date has not maybe, I guess, researched the assassination or CIA or anything, and they wanted to maybe get some more information or get, or maybe have an understanding of why people are so interested in
in the assassination. What's a good starting place for somebody?
Jeff (01:08:09.739)
I recommend a couple of books. You mentioned The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot.
But that's one, that's about Alan Dulles, and I think that's a very good book for understanding the power and the hubris of the CIA. But David's other book called Brothers is the story of what Bobby Kennedy thought about his brother's assassination. And it's a very deeply reported book. He talked to a couple hundred people, and it's really interesting what Bobby Kennedy actually thought.
For somebody who wants to know the story, I think that's a good way to get into it because you see the whole thing through his eyes and you get all the facts of what happened in Dealey Plaza without going in too deep. And you understand the setting in which it occurred. And somebody who was very close to it, his brother was killed. And how did he make sense of this? And how did he make sense of the same evidence you're trying to make sense of?
It's really interesting and that's a good way to get an understanding of the JFK story without getting lost in the conspiracy theories and the weirdness and all of that. So there's another book called Not In Your Lifetime by Anthony Summers, which was one of the first books in the 70s.
But again, a great reporter, talked to tons of people, especially in New Orleans, and really shed a whole new light on that story that Jim Garrison was trying to get at. What was going on with Oswald and the Cubans in New Orleans? A key part of the story and Tony Summer's book, Not in Your Lifetime.
Greg Randolph (01:09:54.572)
you
No.
Greg Randolph (01:10:00.546)
you
you
Jeff (01:10:04.159)
unpacks that very well and doesn't all hang on a conspiracy theory. He has some suggestions about what might have happened, which are kind of like mine. But he doesn't argue it and presents a really rich picture. So those are two books people could read to kind of get up to speed without getting lost or getting thrown off the track by somebody with an axe to grind.
Greg Randolph (01:10:32.322)
Very good. Very good. Well, let's wrap it there. And Jeff, thank you so much for being my guest today. I really appreciate you and your insights and all of your research. It's very, very much appreciated.
Jeff (01:10:42.807)
So yeah, thank you, Greg. Let me know when you post this episode, and I'll post it on JFK Facts for sure. And we'll connect next month and we'll do it again. Okay, take care, man.
Greg Randolph (01:10:52.61)
Jeff, thank you so much. Thank you again everyone. Thank you again everyone for listening to the Heroes and Icons podcast with your host, Greg Randolph. Once more, thank you to my guest, Jefferson Morley. Have a great night. God bless.