Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a
Speaker 1: CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
Speaker 1: in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 2: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 2: our adversaries.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories large and small.
Speaker 3: Could they be true?
Speaker 2: Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1: This is mission implausible?
Speaker 4: All right, guys, I think we've now worked together long
Speaker 4: enough that we can get to the issue that is
Speaker 4: the one I most wanted.
Speaker 1: To talk to you about, the great white whale.
Speaker 4: When people say CIA and conspiracy theories, it's actually kind
Speaker 4: of weird. We haven't done the big one. Where did
Speaker 4: Peanut Eminem? No, that's not it. I love Eminem's are
Speaker 4: good pratsol Eminem's I enjoyed, but I'm against them morally. No,
Speaker 4: we're talking about did you guys kill JFK?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 6: I actually I think the jfk assassination thing is far
Speaker 6: bigger than just did the CIA did it? Because there's
Speaker 6: views that it could have been the Cuba, as it
Speaker 6: could have been the Russians. It could have been the mafia.
Speaker 6: Fux Clay, it could have been the mafia. Like it
Speaker 6: is like the mother of all conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4: So in CIA, are there people who show up as
Speaker 4: new employees and they're like, where are the files?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 4: How is it talked about within CIA?
Speaker 1: That's a good question.
Speaker 2: I mostly people joke about it, don't they.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, I found we're.
Speaker 1: Very focused on collecting foreign intelligence.
Speaker 4: Now and not looking at past successes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, we're too screwed up to be able to
Speaker 2: keep a secret like that for that long.
Speaker 4: All right, so today and we should tell our listeners
Speaker 4: we're going to revisit I mean, to be honest, we
Speaker 4: could do every episode about the JFK assassination and probably
Speaker 4: have more listeners, to be honest with you, not the
Speaker 4: same listeners.
Speaker 1: So what's interesting to me is the JFK assassination theories.
Speaker 1: It's very American. I mean, Richard hoff Staider famously wrote
Speaker 1: The Paranoid dial in American Politics, and that talks about
Speaker 1: how we've always loved these kind of conspiracy theories because
Speaker 1: our country was built on a distrust of elites is
Speaker 1: built into the system.
Speaker 4: And in other countries in the world, though they just
Speaker 4: do kill people. They do kill people.
Speaker 2: Well, this episode is cool because we've never done this before.
Speaker 2: But we've all got together in the same room over
Speaker 2: at John Stearn's house in LA and we had a
Speaker 2: special guest. So, John Stern, why don't you tell us
Speaker 2: who our special guest is.
Speaker 7: You're about to audibly meet my uncle David Rubin. Let's
Speaker 7: cut to the live recording in front of a studio
Speaker 7: audience of four members of my family and three dogs.
Speaker 6: Now and Jerry drank all of John's booze. That's that's
Speaker 6: what I remember about that event. Well, this week's episode
Speaker 6: of Mission and Plasmo is a little bit different. We
Speaker 6: are in person for the first time. Jerry and I
Speaker 6: are in Los Angeles at the home of our producer,
Speaker 6: John Stern, and he's bringing a special guest to us
Speaker 6: to talk to today. And we have a little bit
Speaker 6: of an audience, and we're drinking John's booze, and so
Speaker 6: it may take us a little longer to get to
Speaker 6: the to get to where we're going, but bear with us.
Speaker 7: You gotta talk a lot about the JFK assassination. What
Speaker 7: is your particular fascination and insight to this. I mean,
Speaker 7: you're more than just casual jfk assassination observers.
Speaker 2: Right well, I have still had I have green stains
Speaker 2: on my knee from the Grassy.
Speaker 7: Knoll, but it's just in an area that you're particularly
Speaker 7: interested in talking about, is that right?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 8: I think people who listen to the podcasts will understand
Speaker 8: we are tend to be skeptical of conspiracy theories, and
Speaker 8: jfk assassination theory is one of the great conspiracy theories
Speaker 8: of all times, and so we tend to be nervous
Speaker 8: about digging down too deeply in.
Speaker 2: The rabbit hole.
Speaker 8: But there is a, you know, an important CIA connection.
Speaker 8: One of the early defectors to the CIA you're in, Nsenko,
Speaker 8: came to the United States and told the story of
Speaker 8: being the person who handled the files for the Harvey
Speaker 8: Oswald when he was in Moscow. And of course at
Speaker 8: the time there was a concern when Kennedy was shot,
Speaker 8: were the Russians involved? Where the Russians involved with the Cubans.
Speaker 2: All the conspiracy theories, they can't all be right because
Speaker 2: a lot of them conflict, but they can all be wrong.
Speaker 7: So I should introduce who David Rubin is. He's currently
Speaker 7: a private investigator, but this is at the beginning of
Speaker 7: his career. David, could you back us up and just
Speaker 7: tell us the different jobs you've had.
Speaker 3: Or I started in law enforcement in Chicago for the
Speaker 3: Special Prosecutions Unit of the State's Attorney's Office. It was
Speaker 3: a brand new unit by a brand new State's Attorney,
Speaker 3: Bernard Carey, following a big scandal of a black panther
Speaker 3: shooting with the old regime. Then I got hired by
Speaker 3: San Francisco to start a special investigations unit again. Then
Speaker 3: I got hired by Oakland, City of Oakland to form
Speaker 3: the first police Review Board. Then I left there and
Speaker 3: became a private consultant and private investigator.
Speaker 7: The story we're about to hear, i've met I ever
Speaker 7: heard it from any other source.
Speaker 3: I've never read it, and I don't think.
Speaker 2: It's the answer.
Speaker 7: I think if it's true, it's a piece of the
Speaker 7: puzzle that might spurse some questions. And you said you
Speaker 7: started as a newbie in Chicago, and as a newbe
Speaker 7: you and your partner had to do the job of
Speaker 7: going to Joliet State Prison once a month.
Speaker 3: Is that right? When you work, especially in a new
Speaker 3: investigative unit in a local jurisdiction, you get a lot
Speaker 3: of letters from inmates. Cook County Jail was one of
Speaker 3: our big sources. Of course, Juliet State Penitentiary was another
Speaker 3: big source. And if everybody in state prison or federal
Speaker 3: penitentiaries are innocent, if you ask them, and they all
Speaker 3: provide very detailed letters to tell you why they're innocent,
Speaker 3: so that they could be given forgiveness. What they have
Speaker 3: a committee didn't do that they didn't do because they're
Speaker 3: all indicent. And as a new investigator, one of my
Speaker 3: early assignments was, I got all those letters and I
Speaker 3: we've going to Joe when letters have come in from
Speaker 3: inmates saying we got a bunch of crimes that could
Speaker 3: solve for you if you could get us out of here.
Speaker 3: Of course, and of course ninety nine point nine percent
Speaker 3: of these things were nonsense and we're just feeble attempts
Speaker 3: by inmates to try and swing a deal. Every once
Speaker 3: in a while, I get a little tidbit I might
Speaker 3: help you with some kind of crime, So you went
Speaker 3: along with it, and I'd get a stack on my
Speaker 3: desk of letters, and my partner and I would do
Speaker 3: the interviews with the inmates to see what they had.
Speaker 5: How do they choose who gets these things? And is
Speaker 5: there squabbles between organizations?
Speaker 3: Ever back in the day, there were always squabbles the
Speaker 3: federal agencies and the local agencies. I'm hoping that has
Speaker 3: ceased to be beautiful. They still they still squabble. Okay, gee, gentlemen,
Speaker 3: I shocked to hear that. I mean literally, you would
Speaker 3: investigate the same case. And I mean I remember one
Speaker 3: particular case where literally guns were drawn by the federal
Speaker 3: agents and local and coming around the corner, there's the
Speaker 3: same building under the same investigation. It was lucky nothing disaster,
Speaker 3: which occur. So there's one letter. So a letter comes in. Correct,
Speaker 3: a letter comes in and an inmate states that he
Speaker 3: has information about the Kennedy assassination. So this is nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four, so nine or ten years after the assassination.
Speaker 3: So kind of interesting to read something like that. It
Speaker 3: beats the local I'm minisova a couple of robberies around
Speaker 3: the corner. Letters. So I go and interview this particular
Speaker 3: in it and he gets a story that he had
Speaker 3: had a cell mat that was involved in friends with
Speaker 3: the Jack Ruby connection. And Ruby was from Chicago. He
Speaker 3: was a local club owner, a fringe mobster. Actually was
Speaker 3: friends with Gene Connon. So Jack Ruby and I'm just
Speaker 3: his real name was Rubinstein, Yes, Rubinstein, exactly. You go.
Speaker 5: So Jack Ruby was a owned a couple of sort
Speaker 5: of bars, strip clubs in Dallas, sort of one of
Speaker 5: these people that was on the fringe of society. And
Speaker 5: he was somebody.
Speaker 8: It was either day after the second day after when
Speaker 8: the police were moving Lee Harvey Oswald to a new facility,
Speaker 8: to a new jail. They moved him through an area
Speaker 8: where there's a lot of national news cameras and and
Speaker 8: Jack Ruby essentially just came out of the crowd with
Speaker 8: a gun and shot them in the stomach and killed him.
Speaker 8: And it was the first time there's ever been a
Speaker 8: murder on national television.
Speaker 7: In the long run, what ended upapping Jack Ruby, He
Speaker 7: died in prison. He had he got sick cancer in prison.
Speaker 3: But he never talked, never talked. He never talked, which.
Speaker 8: Adds to conspiracies, right of course, Well he had nothing
Speaker 8: to say.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that I was mad and I killed him, right,
Speaker 2: Well that was.
Speaker 3: That was that he idolized JFK and he was so
Speaker 3: horrified and depressed and angry that he did this spontaneous act.
Speaker 2: That's right, And he never applied. Somebody put it up
Speaker 2: to him to get rid of the Harby Oswald to
Speaker 2: protect like another person behind him or anything.
Speaker 8: And one of the big questions ever was how is
Speaker 8: it possible in such a huge setting with all of
Speaker 8: the police and everybody's there and cameras when you're moving
Speaker 8: the guy to prison or whatever, that security could be
Speaker 8: so laxed to let a guy come up directly to
Speaker 8: the assassin issue.
Speaker 3: Part of the answer to that, which came out at
Speaker 3: some point was that he was connected and had friends
Speaker 3: in the police department. He had a gun ferment, which
Speaker 3: in Texas you send him two Superman comics and you
Speaker 3: get a gun from it.
Speaker 2: And security couldn't have been that good if they let
Speaker 2: all these guys with those big cameras.
Speaker 3: The media was all over the.
Speaker 2: Place, right, they were well known and open. It wasn't
Speaker 2: like a super high security.
Speaker 3: And people know him. I mean, people are hey Jack,
Speaker 3: I mean people were on a first nine basis from
Speaker 3: the police department. With that, he was kind of a
Speaker 3: I think you put it that way, John, he was
Speaker 3: a fringe guy around whatever, and he probably needed police contexts,
Speaker 3: maybe corrupt contexts for his clubs.
Speaker 5: You know, probably give them tidbits of information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, he'd give him something so that they
Speaker 3: would look the other way in a permit or or whatever.
Speaker 3: So that was then, and prior to that, he was
Speaker 3: from Chicago. He was a thug as a kid.
Speaker 7: It's important to know at this stage and the story JFK.
Speaker 7: Even though he was assassinated in Dallas. Originally that parade
Speaker 7: route was going to be in Chicago, but they moved
Speaker 7: it to Dallas.
Speaker 3: So he gave me information that the inmate was friends
Speaker 3: with the Ruby's brother or cousin the first time he
Speaker 3: told me the story his brother brother. So basically, the
Speaker 3: inmate told us that Jack Ruby's brother had rented a
Speaker 3: short term rental along the parade the proposed parade route
Speaker 3: in Chicago, which was probably Michigan Avenue or State Streets
Speaker 3: or one of the main drags there. So we had
Speaker 3: some tidbits and I don't recall exactly what we were able
Speaker 3: to verify, but we verified certain aspects of that, like
Speaker 3: the story or the relative or the effect of that
Speaker 3: was the parade route, but we've verified enough to keep
Speaker 3: us kind of interested. So he'd have you come back
Speaker 3: and he'd give you more information. Yeah, pretty much, or
Speaker 3: we'd say, well that checked out. And he was very
Speaker 3: proud of himself, and he thought, okay, well, you know
Speaker 3: who knows we needed to report this to our supervisor
Speaker 3: because a had interesting tenbits that may be worth following up.
Speaker 3: And we directed because you know, it was kind of unique.
Speaker 3: We reported directly to the states attorneys. But he's former
Speaker 3: at FI, remember, and so he thought that was interesting
Speaker 3: and he said, right, let me call some of my
Speaker 3: old friends. And you called me back in at one
Speaker 3: point and said at b I will take care of this.
Speaker 3: They they're interested, they'll follow up on this. You're off
Speaker 3: that casse. I mean, well, it wasn't even a case really,
Speaker 3: it was kind of an inquiry. I don't even know
Speaker 3: if there had been a case file. Establishment.
Speaker 5: You're following, you're following the clues and leads and well
Speaker 5: down that road.
Speaker 3: Those days you're working with you know, you call him pformance.
Speaker 3: On some level. There are different types of informants, and
Speaker 3: for the sake of discussion, he was an informant about
Speaker 3: information that was potentially worth following up on.
Speaker 2: So they said, don't go down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: Right pretty much, And anyways, it was like, if that's true,
Speaker 3: that's bigger than we are or you are, and again
Speaker 3: I'm twenty four years old. Whatever, this is beyond you
Speaker 3: and we'll turn it over to the bureau. As we
Speaker 3: discussed earlier, locals and fans didn't get along real well.
Speaker 3: But my boss was former FBI and I was so
Speaker 3: far down the totem pole that it wasn't my position to say, well,
Speaker 3: you're kidding, boss, this is great, this is a great
Speaker 3: case for us to follow up on. You know. It
Speaker 3: was like, okay, well here you go.
Speaker 5: Well, even from the beginning again I'm reading.
Speaker 2: This book on Judd to Hoover.
Speaker 8: Hoover was very interested in, you know, very quickly saying
Speaker 8: that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and cutting it
Speaker 8: down because he knew from decades of trying to protect
Speaker 8: the Bureau and then what the Bureau covered, that these
Speaker 8: political sort of issues could get out a hand and
Speaker 8: they would start to rebound against the FBI. So the
Speaker 8: more they started to question, like why didn't they look
Speaker 8: into Lee Harvey Asswold when he traveled to Mexico to
Speaker 8: the Cuban embassy of the Russian embassy, and he was
Speaker 8: in Russian why didn't you do and so he was
Speaker 8: very interested in sort of quickly coming to the conclusion.
Speaker 8: So very quickly they wrote like a four hundred page
Speaker 8: thing which then President Johnson, who followed up after Kennedy
Speaker 8: was killed, decided to create a commission, the Warrent Commission,
Speaker 8: to look into this correct And at the time Johnson
Speaker 8: and Hoover were talking to each other, and both of
Speaker 8: them are trying to say, let's do this as quickly
Speaker 8: as possible.
Speaker 2: Is keep this down.
Speaker 3: I agree with you.
Speaker 8: It looks like it's Lee Harvey Ailswald was trying to
Speaker 8: keep all these other questions out, but of course that
Speaker 8: couldn't happen.
Speaker 5: And as much as they tried to.
Speaker 8: Do that, more and more questions came in regarding the Russians,
Speaker 8: regarding Jack.
Speaker 2: Ruby's and.
Speaker 8: Kennedy right, and THEBA want yes Epians to protect themselves.
Speaker 8: And if you remember, Hoover's boss was Robert Kennedy, also
Speaker 8: in his early thirties at the time, is the attorney.
Speaker 3: And there was no love loss. They hated each other, yeap,
Speaker 3: So I go back to Joliet to tell my quote informant,
Speaker 3: for lack of a better term, that the affair is
Speaker 3: going to look into this, and you should be under
Speaker 3: the circumstances. You would think an informant would be very
Speaker 3: happy for something like that, because it means he's been
Speaker 3: taken seriously exactly. But when I went there, I was
Speaker 3: surprised to find out that he had been killed in prison.
Speaker 3: Oh oh, just in that in those few weeks I
Speaker 3: remember if it was a weight weeks or maybe a
Speaker 3: month and a half, we'll say it was for weeks
Speaker 3: for this for the sake of the discussion.
Speaker 5: And did you find out who killed him?
Speaker 3: Or why? Or I mean not why? Prison? Prison fight?
Speaker 3: That was all I got. It was a prison fight.
Speaker 3: Of course, this happened a lot in prisons. That there
Speaker 3: would be, you know, a guy with a kN It
Speaker 3: could be over turf, it could be over politics, internally, gangs,
Speaker 3: it could be a million things. But the timing was odd,
Speaker 3: certainly in hindsight when you look back at it, it
Speaker 3: was interesting timing. Now I was going to tell him
Speaker 3: we were done anyway.
Speaker 8: Obviously that would make you concern and sort of look
Speaker 8: into things. Did you on your own over the over
Speaker 8: the coming years looking to Jack Ruby and connections. So
Speaker 8: this is potentially suggesting that Jack Ruby may be more involved.
Speaker 8: Traditionally thought that it might have actually been involved working well.
Speaker 3: And again Ruby was Chicago, so you had a connection
Speaker 3: with Ruby in Chicago and a parade route and Kennedy
Speaker 3: in the same time period. Ruby. Going back, I think
Speaker 3: we were talking earlier that there were all these theories
Speaker 3: of course that the Mob assassinated Kennedy. The Jim Kanna connection.
Speaker 5: Wasn't he Chicago too?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he was the godfather in Chicago and he
Speaker 3: was a well known hit. I mean I tailed Jim
Speaker 3: kind of a number of His girlfriend was sleeping with
Speaker 3: Kennedy and gan Conna, and so one of the theories
Speaker 3: was that gian Conna took Kennedy out over the girl,
Speaker 3: over the girlfriend.
Speaker 8: It was crazy kind of like so I know, also
Speaker 8: Kennedy and the CIA were working with the Mob to
Speaker 8: assassinate Castro in Cuba.
Speaker 3: Somebody else, No, that was gan Conna. There was that theory.
Speaker 3: But again Ruby, I think he hadn't worked for Giancanna
Speaker 3: at one point early in his career. They were both
Speaker 3: part of that old Mob the outfit we used to
Speaker 3: call in Chicago. That might have been a local term.
Speaker 3: But there was a connection. I mean, it wasn't a
Speaker 3: far reach to see the connection between Ruby, Chicago, the
Speaker 3: Kennedy Parade route potentially communist. I mean, it wasn't like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: that doesn't make any sense. It wasn't Witchital, Kansas or Newark,
Speaker 3: New Jersey with Chicago with the connection to Kennedy and Ruby.
Speaker 3: So that what made it a little more interesting than
Speaker 3: just oh that is the possible thing.
Speaker 7: Well, the other part of the riddle here is if
Speaker 7: you connect these imaginary dots that the FBI or someone
Speaker 7: someone in the federal government had this witness killed because
Speaker 7: it was exposing.
Speaker 3: What time great analogy. But so you guys are the
Speaker 3: conspiracy theory experts.
Speaker 7: My question to you is, given this information, what what
Speaker 7: could you theorize really happened?
Speaker 3: Given this new information, The.
Speaker 2: Dots aren't theoretical, it's the connections between them that we
Speaker 2: can only guess it. So you've got the dots, but
Speaker 2: how you connect them and whether they connect, Well, let
Speaker 2: me ask a question this epical public was.
Speaker 8: There ever any public thing or authors or journalists who
Speaker 8: dug in if that I ever recalled.
Speaker 7: That's why it's a story that I've only heard from
Speaker 7: him and nowhere else.
Speaker 8: Will this story even more interested if in the coming
Speaker 8: weeks after this is air that he's killed.
Speaker 3: One. We can only hope this show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was really a pretty.
Speaker 3: Mad pleasure. I'm in John Stearn's home.
Speaker 5: What's the address again?
Speaker 3: And I'll be living here for a cemetery.
Speaker 2: He's got vicious dogs, but he.
Speaker 3: Does one story.
Speaker 7: Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and when
Speaker 7: we come back, probably Uncle be able to tell us
Speaker 7: who killed get it?
Speaker 3: Where is that one? I mean, you know, you look
Speaker 3: back at it and you can project a lot of
Speaker 3: possibilities here. I mean, this guy could have run full
Speaker 3: of crap. Maybe he had a cellmate that knew Jack
Speaker 3: Ruby's family, and the rest of it was made up.
Speaker 3: The thing that made it more interesting if you look
Speaker 3: back at it, was that Kennedy was supposedly going to
Speaker 3: be Integra and the parade room and the parade also,
Speaker 3: just like in Dallas, back in those days, parade roots
Speaker 3: and presidents were public. They were publishing front page of
Speaker 3: newspapers so that the public could go and watch president.
Speaker 8: Do you remember more about the cellmate, because I mean,
Speaker 8: obviously that's the key.
Speaker 3: Like who was that he was, where did he go?
Speaker 3: Who's he was? He was a non entity, and that's
Speaker 3: what kind of made it problematic. He had a link
Speaker 3: that he was a Chicago win so that made it
Speaker 3: a little more credible. A lot of guys from the
Speaker 3: Mob were in Joliet, and so there was a link
Speaker 3: between the Chicago Mob and inmates into Chicago. So informiation
Speaker 3: could have easily gone between those two sources. Jerry and
Speaker 3: John separately.
Speaker 7: What is your prevailing theory about the Kennedy assassination?
Speaker 2: There's so much, there's so much to it.
Speaker 8: I think, probably similar to Jerry is we tend to
Speaker 8: believe the simplest explanation, right. So there were professional investigators,
Speaker 8: there was the FBI, the Warrent Commission. Lots of people
Speaker 8: have looked at this, and even the people who come
Speaker 8: up with all sorts of theories, they are less likely
Speaker 8: than the direct theory that a crazy guy who had
Speaker 8: connections that were worth looking into in Russia and Cuba
Speaker 8: and Mexico and all the sorts of places decided to
Speaker 8: kill the president.
Speaker 5: And just a few years ago, reread the War and
Speaker 5: Commission stuff.
Speaker 8: And this was after there had been the movie, and
Speaker 8: there's been a number of other books and stories of
Speaker 8: complaining about the War and Commission that they didn't look
Speaker 8: into this.
Speaker 2: It did seem to cover a lot of those things.
Speaker 5: The War Commission seemed to cover a lot of the things.
Speaker 3: There was pretty terrible that.
Speaker 8: People said, oh, they didn't look into this, and they
Speaker 8: did look at that they and I thought they did.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I get concerned when people get wrapped around the
Speaker 2: axel On minutia. There's sort of two things that I'm
Speaker 2: concerned about it. This one is these detailed descriptions of
Speaker 2: ballistics on the bullet couldn't.
Speaker 9: Have ballistics is a very inexacic science, and understanding how
Speaker 9: a bullet travels is something that's extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible,
Speaker 9: to predict.
Speaker 2: And the other thing is that the CIA always seems
Speaker 2: to get involved. I think if there was a Winer conspiracy,
Speaker 2: it would seem to me that it would be one
Speaker 2: of two things. It was one Castro was looking to
Speaker 2: kill Kennedy, because Kennedy was looking to kill absolutely right.
Speaker 2: And we do know that the shooter spent time in
Speaker 2: Mexico and the other is that the Soviets were humiliated
Speaker 2: after the standoff, and so this is a guy, the
Speaker 2: Harvey Oswald, who spent time in Russia, and to be frank,
Speaker 2: the Soviets did have a long history of killing people
Speaker 2: they didn't like. Now it is a stretch killing the
Speaker 2: President the United States, But it's not beyond the pale
Speaker 2: that Lee Harvey Oswald would have thought, in meeting with
Speaker 2: a case officer that that's what they wanted, or that
Speaker 2: he was doing them a favor. It doesn't always have
Speaker 2: to be I want you to do X. It's often
Speaker 2: could be he was trying to show off. But I
Speaker 2: think the fact that he had links to the KGB
Speaker 2: and lived there, I think if he lived there, it's
Speaker 2: almost impossible for him not to have had links. So
Speaker 2: I'm open to those possibilities, but I don't think they've
Speaker 2: been proven.
Speaker 8: Lee Harveaz was a marine, right a sharpshooter, sharp shooters
Speaker 8: or whatever you call at the time, was in Japan
Speaker 8: and then eventually left the Marines and defected to Russia.
Speaker 8: Made his way to Moscow. The KGB did question him there,
Speaker 8: married a Russian woman, and the.
Speaker 5: KGB then sent him to Belarus. To mintzk which is
Speaker 5: a republic inside Russia.
Speaker 8: Married a Bellerussian woman, Marina, and then eventually he was
Speaker 8: working as a tool of die person there for some
Speaker 8: period of time and maybe even as much of a
Speaker 8: couple of years, tried to change his citizenship for being
Speaker 8: an American to being a Russian and eventually made his
Speaker 8: way back to the United States and the KGB part
Speaker 8: of it. Obviously, after the shooting, the concern was, oh,
Speaker 8: my god, the guy who shot Kennedy had spent time
Speaker 8: in Russia and clearly had connections with the Russian intelligence.
Speaker 5: Services to KGB at the time.
Speaker 8: And he had traveled to Mexico and been seen visiting
Speaker 8: the Russian embassy at the Quban Embassy while he was
Speaker 8: in Mexico, and the FBI was aware of this and
Speaker 8: were investigating. They hadn't talked to him yet, but they
Speaker 8: had investigated this prior to the shooting, so when the
Speaker 8: shooting came up, they were like, ooh, we've been paying
Speaker 8: attention to this guy, not because we thought he'd be
Speaker 8: an assassin, but because we thought he was tied to
Speaker 8: the Communist Party. If you remember, at the time, they
Speaker 8: were very focused on communists and then similar to this
Speaker 8: time a Russian defector, and then you're in Asenko defects
Speaker 8: the United States and says.
Speaker 5: Oh, by the way, among the other things, I'm telling.
Speaker 8: You, I was on the internal service to KGB, which
Speaker 8: looked at foreigners inside Russia, and I looked at the
Speaker 8: file of Lejavey Oswald and we talked to him, but
Speaker 8: we thought he was a low level nobody and sent
Speaker 8: him off to Minsk and didn't pay much attention to him.
Speaker 8: But of course then there was a big concern afterwards
Speaker 8: that like, did the Russians send this guy to us
Speaker 8: here to tell us this story to try to deflect
Speaker 8: us from interest. So all of a sudden, you know,
Speaker 8: the Russian Kremlin says, holy shit, our guy killed the
Speaker 8: president of the United States. They're gonna realize we were
Speaker 8: behind it.
Speaker 5: Send this defector off to tell the story.
Speaker 3: That we had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 8: And so that went on and on, and it's a
Speaker 8: really sad story part of the CIA, because this guy
Speaker 8: was eventually brought down to a special prison cell that
Speaker 8: was created just for him to be to be interrogated
Speaker 8: for several years and given drugs and all sorts of things,
Speaker 8: and he never confessed, and there was lots of internal
Speaker 8: CIA studies back and forth different parts of the CIA,
Speaker 8: and Head of Counterintelligence James Ingleton, was convinced that Mosenko
Speaker 8: was a false defector came here to try to deflect us,
Speaker 8: and other people thought the opposite. Eventually, over lots of
Speaker 8: internal fights over a number of years, the CIA came
Speaker 8: to the conclusion which the FBI had come to long before,
Speaker 8: that Nosenko was a real defector and that Russians likely
Speaker 8: did not have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 2: As far as the I mean, how things work in
Speaker 2: real life. There's one incident I can think of, and
Speaker 2: I'm not going to go into specific details, but something
Speaker 2: violent happened, and it happened to one of our adversaries
Speaker 2: in a country. And what came out of this violent
Speaker 2: event was we were able to get some intelligence out
Speaker 2: of it. Right, something was stolen from one of our
Speaker 2: adversaries that would be helpful to us. Oh, well, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: And one of my guys comes to me afterwards and says, hey, man,
Speaker 2: I was out drinking with some of our buddies, like
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks ago, and we were drinking, and
Speaker 2: I said, wouldn't it be funny if somebody did this?
Speaker 2: And they all laughed and we said yeah. He said, oh,
Speaker 2: it would be like something out of a novel, and
Speaker 2: then we just moved on. And then exactly what he
Speaker 2: said happened. And basically there was a break in in
Speaker 2: this one place and the computers were stolen. And he's like,
Speaker 2: I didn't order him to it. I just had a
Speaker 2: couple of drinks and I was just.
Speaker 3: Like, I didn't do nothing. I didn't, you know.
Speaker 2: And they obviously afterwards they went, that's sort of interesting,
Speaker 2: Maybe we should do that. And they probably also thought,
Speaker 2: was he hinting to us that we should do it?
Speaker 2: And he was not right. He didn't even think of
Speaker 2: it after that. And so when I think of Lee
Speaker 2: Harvey Oswald, I also want under if he didn't talk
Speaker 2: to one of his handlers, or when he went into
Speaker 2: the walked into the embassy in Mexico to the Soviet embassy,
Speaker 2: if somebody didn't said that fucking Kennedy, you know, bah,
Speaker 2: and he's thinking, hey, I can be a hero. That
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that they did it, But I think there's
Speaker 2: a lot of gray areas in there.
Speaker 5: There's other theories.
Speaker 2: There's many theories.
Speaker 8: I don't know all of them, but we have a friend,
Speaker 8: longtime senior career CIA officer worked in all kinds of places,
Speaker 8: very accomplished. It's a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but
Speaker 8: also very bright who was really dug into this. He
Speaker 8: would have to explain it because I don't know all
Speaker 8: the deal, but he believes there was a generation of
Speaker 8: CI officers were really angry at Kennedy for not taking
Speaker 8: on Communism the Soviets properly, and especially after the Bay
Speaker 8: of Pigs where they were sort of hung out to dry,
Speaker 8: and therefore may have been involved in something related to
Speaker 8: the assassination. I don't know anything about it. I don't
Speaker 8: buy it necessarily, but this is another one of the
Speaker 8: theories that can He was hated by the hardcore right
Speaker 8: wing people of the National security space, so it.
Speaker 2: Wasn't CIA, it was CIA officers working on their own
Speaker 2: I think that's what.
Speaker 8: I'd have to have a listen to that Mission Impossible
Speaker 8: movie Rogue Office.
Speaker 2: I think John and I would agree that if it
Speaker 2: was a CIA operation, it is almost impossible inside of
Speaker 2: the CII to keep something like that secret. I mean
Speaker 2: there would be highly classified operations that I was not
Speaker 2: read into that. I don't even know how. I didn't
Speaker 2: know the details, but I kind of knew him from
Speaker 2: hanging around in the coffee shop, or you know, you
Speaker 2: walk in on a meeting and the dots and duncan
Speaker 2: do yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I have heard in
Speaker 2: thirty three years, not a peep out of like we
Speaker 2: might have been involved, or again it was a bit
Speaker 2: before our time, But I never heard anything like that
Speaker 2: any what about you?
Speaker 8: Impossible to imagine that they could be held that secret
Speaker 8: for that long on their deathbed, wouldn't say anything like
Speaker 8: I mean, I worked in for thirty years, I had
Speaker 8: any inkling who about it.
Speaker 3: I'd like it.
Speaker 5: I'd try to make some cash off right now.
Speaker 7: Now we still might figure out who killed Kennedy, but
Speaker 7: we have.
Speaker 2: To have a short break first.
Speaker 3: No, I know, no one cares about my theory. I do.
Speaker 3: I've developed this as a result of working with you guys.
Speaker 2: I don't like it now, I don't like it.
Speaker 5: I've learned so much from.
Speaker 7: So I don't have a theory as to why leave
Speaker 7: Harvey Oswald killed him, Whether it was the Cubans, the mafia,
Speaker 7: the Russians, the CIA, whatever, he was connected to someone.
Speaker 7: But I do have a theory that at some point
Speaker 7: the federal government figured out who was behind it, maybe
Speaker 7: even a very loose way. But who would get blamed
Speaker 7: for being behind it? Maybe there's a Russians, maybe there's
Speaker 7: a Cubans, there's a mob, right, whoever it was, it
Speaker 7: is better to keep that hidden than to allow that
Speaker 7: to come out, because then there would have to be
Speaker 7: a response. And the only way there couldn't be a
Speaker 7: response that's required is if it was a lone gunman.
Speaker 7: If it was the CIA, well all hell breaks. If
Speaker 7: it was a mob, I mean war between the government
Speaker 7: and the mob at that point. If it was Russia
Speaker 7: or Cuba, then it's World War three. This dovetails with
Speaker 7: your story about the informant being killed by I'll just
Speaker 7: say the FBI, because it was necessary to keep whoever
Speaker 7: was behind this under wraps.
Speaker 2: So let me throw this stchet from someone who has
Speaker 2: done conspiracies, not obviously like this, But.
Speaker 10: You know you didn't kill Kennedy, No, but you were
Speaker 10: telling yeah.
Speaker 2: So your operation is only as good as the weakest link.
Speaker 2: So if insert whoever it is wants to kill Kennedy,
Speaker 2: if who they're going to use, if they're vector, even
Speaker 2: if he's not the only guy, let's run with the
Speaker 2: grassi and old theory. He's gonna get he's gonna get caught.
Speaker 2: And Lee Harvey Oswald, by all accounts, is not a
Speaker 2: guy who's going to keep his mouth shut.
Speaker 3: That's for Jack Ruby, because.
Speaker 2: Well, now you're getting into a pretty byzantine conspiracy.
Speaker 5: But if you assume institutions have incentives, is what you're saying.
Speaker 5: You're saying each institutions and incentively, if we thought it
Speaker 5: was the Russians that might start a war, if we
Speaker 5: thought it was the mob, it might start And so
Speaker 5: the FBI is saying, Okay, we don't want to do
Speaker 5: this because we don't want to start a war with
Speaker 5: the mob, and c I just wanted to just want
Speaker 5: to start a war with the Russians or whatever.
Speaker 8: That's giving institutions almost like human brains and they're thinking
Speaker 8: this thing through.
Speaker 5: But there's a lot of people institutions.
Speaker 8: And they don't always think the same way. And so
Speaker 8: there's all kinds of people at low levels who are
Speaker 8: getting this kind of stuff, and you're assuming that somehow
Speaker 8: they think the same way, Like, yes, if the leadership
Speaker 8: got together and said we don't want that to come out,
Speaker 8: but I'm I don't care.
Speaker 2: If there's a way with the Russians.
Speaker 5: This is exciting ship, I'm gonna like tell.
Speaker 2: Everybody, but I'm gonna tell it. I'm gonna get drunk
Speaker 2: and tell my money. So well, who would do that?
Speaker 7: This is the flaw that you guys find with almost
Speaker 7: one hundred percent of the conspiracy theories, which is there
Speaker 7: are just too many people that would have had to
Speaker 7: keep it secret and it would have.
Speaker 3: Come out right.
Speaker 7: And Jerry's always saying Occam's razor to all of these things,
Speaker 7: and it's it's hard to disagree, although once in a
Speaker 7: while it's.
Speaker 2: A is a rule of thumb, which doesn't mean it always.
Speaker 8: Well, the problem is there's probably pieces of this that
Speaker 8: don't hold together that people don't want to talk about.
Speaker 2: It leads people down roads and stuff.
Speaker 8: So so yeah, I think there's probably more story than
Speaker 8: the clean story. But that whether that means it's a
Speaker 8: massive conspiracy?
Speaker 2: So is it?
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 2: You've spent a lot of time with the police, right,
Speaker 2: if you were gonna kill Kennedy, would you again again?
Speaker 2: Would you would you would you put somebody in a
Speaker 2: tower where they don't have, you know, a perfect shot.
Speaker 2: They got to get it just right, or would you
Speaker 2: put it? There's like other ways of doing it much
Speaker 2: more ways were like you're more likely to get away absolutely,
Speaker 2: like maybe get a better rifle, maybe get a better shot,
Speaker 2: maybe get out, you know.
Speaker 3: The poison theory, you know, put a bomb in the road.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of things you can do. And if
Speaker 2: I were going to do it, I get a better rifle,
Speaker 2: I'd probably get it. If I was wanting to pancy,
Speaker 2: I'd get a better better, better pantsy than Oswald I
Speaker 2: would put. You know, I would be thinking of like
Speaker 2: how am I getting How is he going to get away? Well,
Speaker 2: because you want to get.
Speaker 3: Away, Yeah, that's the key is you make a plan,
Speaker 3: but the plan involves how I get away with it.
Speaker 3: But of course the prisoners are all full of guys,
Speaker 3: we're idiots.
Speaker 8: Well, yeah, it's funny, like we've seen a number of
Speaker 8: recently Indians, the Turks and the Russians now in Europe
Speaker 8: had like tried to hire killers to take out people
Speaker 8: for them. There's this interesting thing that a lot of
Speaker 8: people try to reach out to find hitmen. And I
Speaker 8: think law enforcement has been like incredibly successful because essentially
Speaker 8: there are no hitmen. People come looking for hitmen, there's
Speaker 8: no such thing. But they people start looking for him,
Speaker 8: and then they come across law enforcements thing and they're like,
Speaker 8: let's watch this guy.
Speaker 2: The Russian guy who killed the dissident in Berlin. His getaway.
Speaker 2: He was on a freaking bicycle. So he rode by
Speaker 2: and he shot and killed the guy. But everybody saw
Speaker 2: it was in broad daylight, and you know what, his
Speaker 2: bicycle could not run a police guard right.
Speaker 3: Went through.
Speaker 2: Well I don't know, I mean thinking that this is
Speaker 2: a paid Russian.
Speaker 8: But Whattin did then is arrested, A bunch of Americans
Speaker 8: held them prisoner and then swapped to get the guy.
Speaker 7: There's always one step ahead that guy and the the.
Speaker 2: Indians didn't do a very good job. They got caught
Speaker 2: and in Canada and Canada and on other than Michael Flynn,
Speaker 2: the National Security Advisor for a couple of days did
Speaker 2: talk to he's.
Speaker 3: A frequent target of this podcast.
Speaker 2: Well he did. He did talk about trying to kidnap
Speaker 2: this he today gulan.
Speaker 8: Turkish guy in Pennsylvania that awan the head of Turkey
Speaker 8: believes did a big coup against him.
Speaker 2: You know, even Michael Flynn when he was on the
Speaker 2: inside and he was going after al Qaida and Isis
Speaker 2: and Iraq, he was effective and efficient and he made
Speaker 2: things happen. And well, these guys were his guys, were
Speaker 2: his guys were. But you know, he came up with
Speaker 2: a shitty planned to try to kidnap a guy out
Speaker 2: of the Poconos and didn't work out. For at least
Speaker 2: he said he did. John and I never got caught.
Speaker 3: By the way, we're just putting that out.
Speaker 8: It helps not to actually do it.
Speaker 2: But we never got I never got you never got arrested.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I don't think he solved it, But this is this
Speaker 2: is great.
Speaker 3: Oh it's interesting and now fifty some years later, but
Speaker 3: you look back at you you know, maybe something to it,
Speaker 3: but again just another theory.
Speaker 2: And running operations. I will say that the world is
Speaker 2: full of weird coincidences, right, absolutely, It's like coincidences happen
Speaker 2: all the time. We're taught we do surveillance detection.
Speaker 8: Once you're out, you're moving, let's you're driving your car
Speaker 8: to see a phone's following and you're chosen a route
Speaker 8: that you believe you can manipulate someone who might be
Speaker 8: tracking you and see.
Speaker 2: What they're there. You're like hyper aware.
Speaker 8: You look around and you realize there's all kinds of
Speaker 8: shit that's like there's guys sitting.
Speaker 5: In cars and people in places. Also you're like, oh
Speaker 5: my god, what that doesn't make sense?
Speaker 2: Why are they doing this? Like why did this part?
Speaker 5: Like all kinds of stuff that doesn't make sense. You
Speaker 5: got to work your way through that and find a
Speaker 5: way to continue on to it. It's all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 3: Also, I think we all found out an investigation, it's
Speaker 3: usually the simple answer. Yeah. In the end, we talked
Speaker 3: about these conspiracies and these complicated ways of looking at things,
Speaker 3: And in the end, I most investigation goes, of course.
Speaker 2: He did yeah, the butler.
Speaker 3: The butler did it. The butler did it.
Speaker 2: I remember one time I broke a rule at CIA.
Speaker 2: I was supposed to meet this guy and we're gonna
Speaker 2: meet in a certain place, and he was early and
Speaker 2: I bumped into him on the street, and we probably
Speaker 2: shouldn't have said anything to each other, right, pretending we
Speaker 2: didn't know each other, but he didn't, and he looked
Speaker 2: at me and said, can we please please just go
Speaker 2: for a drink. And now this is in Berlin, where
Speaker 2: there are fifteen hundred bars and restaurants and everything like that,
Speaker 2: and he says, I just want to have a drink,
Speaker 2: you know, just the two USTs, like the old days.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, we're both clean. Who's gonna know, right,
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, twenty minutes, I'll meet you at a
Speaker 2: certain place at a certain time, like wasn't far away.
Speaker 2: And so we went off and we went into this
Speaker 2: bacrner of an Irish pub in places a few people in.
Speaker 2: It was really big and dark, and we shared a
Speaker 2: beer and talked, and then he went back and then
Speaker 2: we did our correct meeting. The next day, I went
Speaker 2: into work and another officer came over to me and said,
Speaker 2: how was your guinness?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 3: And I'm like.
Speaker 2: And he said, I saw you sitting over in the
Speaker 2: corner over there. And I said, was that so and so?
Speaker 2: And I'm like, yeah it was. I said, where were you?
Speaker 2: He says, I was in another corner with another thing.
Speaker 2: I was meeting with selling. Oh my god, we had
Speaker 2: two meetings in the same place. Today they are like
Speaker 2: twelve hundred.
Speaker 7: Places in the Cold War would have ended sooner up
Speaker 7: that was the only really dark Irish Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, Dave, it was incredible to hear your story. I'd
Speaker 2: love to hear more of your stories. We've we've crossed
Speaker 2: in different places.
Speaker 8: Your stories about how different agencies work and don't work
Speaker 8: together resonates with us around. I want to thank you
Speaker 8: very much much for spending some time with us, and
Speaker 8: it's also nice to be together for a change.
Speaker 3: Not Worthy.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
Speaker 7: and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 2: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 7: Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable
Speaker 7: pictures for iHeart Podcasts.