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