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 2: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1: This is mission implausible. So, as you know, we've been
Speaker 1: careful about putting our foot too deep into the JFK wormhole,
Speaker 1: but we found an interesting way in. We're going to
Speaker 1: interview and talk to one of our friends, Phil Robinson,
Speaker 1: a well known Hollywood director and writer who did fall
Speaker 1: down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: So we're going to be doing that, And as always,
Speaker 3: I just want to know, what are you hiding?
Speaker 4: Why have we done so many episodes of this show
Speaker 4: with two former CIA officers and you just refuse to
Speaker 4: do JFK until I browbeat you.
Speaker 2: Well, as you know, dam you know, you recruit assets early.
Speaker 2: And I was four when JFK was killed and John
Speaker 2: was only two, so you know, we.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with all the drinking we did, and now we're older,
Speaker 1: I could very well know that the CIA was involved
Speaker 1: in killing Kennedy and I forgot it completely.
Speaker 3: All right, let me ask you this. Forget JFK. You
Speaker 3: don't have to tell me what it is. But is
Speaker 3: there a big shocking thing that the CIA did that
Speaker 3: if you told us would be like, WHOA, I can't
Speaker 3: believe that.
Speaker 2: No, yes, but had a good way. It's like what
Speaker 2: you did this, you saved all those people.
Speaker 1: But you know what, people are so cynical that would
Speaker 1: be like, that's what we expect you to do.
Speaker 2: Well, it's it's a lot of ways. It's the lack
Speaker 2: of something which makes puts us oh Is at a disadvantage.
Speaker 2: After nine to eleven, we know that al Qaeda was
Speaker 2: talking about a second strike and there were plans in place.
Speaker 2: It never happened. There's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 2: But we you know, terrible things could have happened, bombs
Speaker 2: that didn't go. I mean, those are sort of the
Speaker 2: things I'm thinking about.
Speaker 1: We definitely stopped lots of terrorist attacks. We've definitely stopped
Speaker 1: lots of terrorists. But is that what you're talking about him?
Speaker 1: Is that exciting to.
Speaker 2: You for us to say it's not exciting enough, that's
Speaker 2: your job.
Speaker 3: Come on, you want what do you want? You want
Speaker 3: to met?
Speaker 1: It was pretty goddamn exciting that much, I can tell you.
Speaker 5: I bet it is exciting.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's more fun when it's did you kill
Speaker 4: presidents and stuff? I guess that is true. I guess
Speaker 4: that is why conspiracy theories win.
Speaker 1: Is it interesting if a president form president was a
Speaker 1: spy for us? Or if we do have to kill
Speaker 1: him for it to be interesting?
Speaker 2: Wait?
Speaker 3: Was a former president of a spy for you?
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that, but it would that be interesting
Speaker 1: to you?
Speaker 2: That would be which one ran the CIA?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm excited to hear what your friend Phil
Speaker 3: Robinson has to say.
Speaker 1: Today's guest is Phil Robinson. Phil is a Hollywood big shot.
Speaker 1: He's a writer and director, having written and directed such
Speaker 1: classic films as Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Some of All Fears,
Speaker 1: and involved with Band of Brothers and he Rewrote a
Speaker 1: personal favorite of mine. But more importantly, he's a friend
Speaker 1: of ours and for our purposes today, he's a recovering
Speaker 1: obsessive on the assassination of President John F.
Speaker 2: Kennedy.
Speaker 5: Phil, welcome, It's very nice to be here.
Speaker 1: It's funny just because we know you, we know that
Speaker 1: you were interested in this. I know you've done some
Speaker 1: work on the Cuban missile crisis and Beya Pigs. But
Speaker 1: how did you get involved in following the rabbit hole
Speaker 1: of the Kennedy assassination.
Speaker 5: I was in college in I guess it was the
Speaker 5: beginning of college in nineteen sixty seven. A friend of
Speaker 5: mine was a rabid conspiracy buff and he turned me
Speaker 5: on to Mark Lane's book, excellent book called Rush to Judgment,
Speaker 5: which was a fairly scholarly dissection of the war and Report.
Speaker 5: And I think Lane did a real service by saying, Hey,
Speaker 5: the War Report's got a lot of problems. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of inconsistencies, there's omissions, there's mistakes. Lane inferred that
Speaker 5: that was the result of a cover up, but he
Speaker 5: also implied, look, this could be a rush to judgment.
Speaker 5: They were told to come out with this conclusion. They
Speaker 5: worked very fast, and they ignored certain things, they covered
Speaker 5: up other things, and this was the result a report
Speaker 5: that said Oswald acted alone, there was no conspiracy. The
Speaker 5: conspiracy theories kind of began at that point, and I
Speaker 5: was obsessed with them. They were fascinating. It was fun
Speaker 5: to talk about that the CIA and the FBI and
Speaker 5: the Secret Service and the mafia and anti Castro Cubans
Speaker 5: or Procrastro Cubans, and all these people were involved in
Speaker 5: the conspiracy and somehow kept the secret all these years.
Speaker 5: I loved learning more about it. Every book that came out,
Speaker 5: I would read it, and then I would bore my
Speaker 5: friends by keeping them ball all night, telling them about
Speaker 5: the hoboes who were removed from the train tracts and
Speaker 5: the railroad overpass over Elm Street, one of whom looked
Speaker 5: exactly like Howard Hunt. And you can show the picture
Speaker 5: and you go, I guess it looks a little like
Speaker 5: Howard Hunt. There was a lot of cool stuff, and
Speaker 5: I realized, after years and years of obsessing on this,
Speaker 5: that I wanted to believe the conspiracy theories. And then
Speaker 5: I was not a applying the same level of rigorous
Speaker 5: skepticism to conspiracy theories that I was applying to the
Speaker 5: government's case. And I started looking at them in a
Speaker 5: different light, and they all fell apart. I remember the day.
Speaker 5: It was in the eighties. I was reading a new
Speaker 5: book about the assassination, and I thought, wait a second,
Speaker 5: this doesn't make sense. They wouldn't have planned it this way.
Speaker 5: And I realized all the conspiracy theories were constructed from
Speaker 5: today looking back at this constellation of facts and semi
Speaker 5: facts and whatnot, and you could select what you wanted
Speaker 5: and connect dots and make a scenario that made some
Speaker 5: sort of sense. But that's not how the conspiracy was constructed.
Speaker 5: It was constructed before the assassination by people planning what's
Speaker 5: the best way to do this? And if you just
Speaker 5: look at these theories from that point of view, none
Speaker 5: of them made sense. They all seemed impossible.
Speaker 2: Neither John nor I think I could speak for John,
Speaker 2: neither of us have gone down the JFK conspiracy. See
Speaker 2: rabbit hole, right. It's a whole industry. It's almost a
Speaker 2: way of life for some people. But with the Warren Report,
Speaker 2: I just have a really basic question in one that is,
Speaker 2: an intelligence officer always gets face, and it comes down
Speaker 2: to the burden of proof. The Warren Report says that
Speaker 2: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Is that exactly what it said or did it say
Speaker 2: that we have no evidence that there was a conspiracy
Speaker 2: that others weren't involved. There's a difference between we can
Speaker 2: prove there was no one else involved in a conspiracy,
Speaker 2: which is almost impossible to because you can never prove
Speaker 2: a negative, righty right, it's unfalsifiable.
Speaker 5: I could be wrong. My recollection as they were very definitive.
Speaker 5: I read the first volume. There's twenty six volumes of
Speaker 5: the Warren Report, and then there's some I read that
Speaker 5: when it came out. My recollection is they were very definitive.
Speaker 5: There was no conspiracy. He acted alone, there was no
Speaker 5: second assassin. In the seventies Committee on Assassinations and they
Speaker 5: studied various assassinations, mostly the JFK one, they included a
Speaker 5: lot of evidence supposed as evidence that had come out
Speaker 5: since the Warrant Report, and they concluded it was probably
Speaker 5: a conspiracy. But they then said, but we can rule
Speaker 5: out the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the mafia, Cuba, Russia,
Speaker 5: and anti Castro Cubans. They ruled out everybody who had
Speaker 5: ever been suggested as a possible conspirator, leaving I don't
Speaker 5: know who. And the reason that they said it was
Speaker 5: probably a conspiracy was one piece of evidence which was
Speaker 5: a Dickta belt. A Dickta belt recording supposedly a Dallas
Speaker 5: police officer on a motorcycle in Deey Plaza had left
Speaker 5: his microphone open and there was a dickt de belt
Speaker 5: recording of this that people who listened to it said,
Speaker 5: I hear four gunshots. Based on that one piece of evidence,
Speaker 5: the House Select Committee said there was a fourth gun shot,
Speaker 5: probably from the Grassy Knoll, and therefore it's a conspiracy.
Speaker 5: Some years later, a panel of acoustical experts took a
Speaker 5: look at this and said, no, A, these are not gunshots,
Speaker 5: and b it did not take place at the time
Speaker 5: of the assassination this recording, thereby ruling out that one
Speaker 5: piece of evidence. The interesting thing about what the House
Speaker 5: Select Committee said a fourth gun shot from the Grassy Null.
Speaker 5: Remember the grassy Knoll is where the supposed professional assassin
Speaker 5: was shooting from. If he fired the fourth gunshot, he missed.
Speaker 5: According to that theory Oswald, the amateur fired three shots,
Speaker 5: hit Kennedy twice, the professional and the grassy null fired once,
Speaker 5: and so it kind of doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: So the FBI. JEdgar Hoover's FBI did an initial like
Speaker 1: fifty page overview very soon after the assassination, and Hoover
Speaker 1: himself pushed President Johnson to simply accept the FBI's report,
Speaker 1: and because Hoover did not want to open up the
Speaker 1: Bureau for criticism. They'd been monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald, they
Speaker 1: hadn't spoke with him, and obviously they weren't tracking him
Speaker 1: on the day of the assassination. And Hoover and Johnson
Speaker 1: were pretty good friends. They lived on the same street
Speaker 1: before Johnson was president, and Johnson eventually realized he did
Speaker 1: have to have a special commission, but he nonetheless pushed
Speaker 1: them to try to accept the FBI view, which I
Speaker 1: think was right. But because trying to protect the Bureau,
Speaker 1: it was limited and it failed to anticipate all the
Speaker 1: possible scenarios and rule them out.
Speaker 5: And I think Mark Lane was right. I think the
Speaker 5: Warrent Commission did omit certain things that they probably should
Speaker 5: have included, particularly regarding Lee Oswald's background. And my theory
Speaker 5: about that is that, as we learned from the Church
Speaker 5: Committee in the seventies, Oswald was a kind of a
Speaker 5: fringe character in this shadowy world in which the intelligence
Speaker 5: community and law enforcement at the mafia were involved in
Speaker 5: all kinds of illegal activities together, assassinations, spying on Americans,
Speaker 5: trading political groups. And I think that Oswald, when he
Speaker 5: was in New Orleans, rubbed shoulders with some of this.
Speaker 5: And I think the Warrant Commission felt if we reveal
Speaker 5: all we know about Lee Oswald's background having nothing to
Speaker 5: do with the assassination, it could bring down the whole house.
Speaker 5: So let's just put a lid on that stuff. And
Speaker 5: I think in the course of doing that, it made
Speaker 5: it look like they were covering up the assassination, when
Speaker 5: in fact they were covering up something else. That's just
Speaker 5: a theory.
Speaker 6: Years ago, there was a reporting that had come out
Speaker 6: from in the press, but according to the agency, there
Speaker 6: was real indications that the GRU the Russian intelligence service,
Speaker 6: was offering bounties for the killing of American CIA officers
Speaker 6: back then in Afghanistan and of US officials. And we
Speaker 6: could never prove that one hundred percent officially, and to
Speaker 6: a certain extent that that's good insofar as even if
Speaker 6: we're only ninety ninety five percent certain that's true that
Speaker 6: the Russians are putting bounties on the heads of our officers,
Speaker 6: that is arguably that's a cause for war, I mean,
Speaker 6: because you have to respond to that. So you've got
Speaker 6: to have at one hundred percent learn that in the
Speaker 6: Iraq war, with WMD claiming that it was there, when
Speaker 6: it turns out it likely was, but it wasn't.
Speaker 2: If with the Kennedy assassination, with Oswald having close ties
Speaker 2: to both Cuba and certainly to Russia, if one of
Speaker 2: the theories entertained and talked about was there is good
Speaker 2: reason to believe that Cashrow or Russia was behind this.
Speaker 2: Where does that take us? That takes us on a
Speaker 2: maybe to the brink of war, and is that really
Speaker 2: worthwhile if we can't be certain?
Speaker 1: But in that case, you are actually suggesting a potential
Speaker 1: cover up to.
Speaker 2: Me based on nothing. It does make sense. He was
Speaker 2: a Russian citizen, He was in the Russian embassy. Before this,
Speaker 2: the Bay Pigs had gone down. He and Cruise Jutt
Speaker 2: has squared off in Vienna the Cuban missile crisis. The
Speaker 2: Russians may have seen him, or some rogue element may
Speaker 2: have suggested to him that it would be a good
Speaker 2: idea for Kennedy to be gotten rid of zero evidence
Speaker 2: of this, right, I mean but it's how many Americans
Speaker 2: in those days were hanging out in the Russian embassy
Speaker 2: and then having the shootcaster. I think.
Speaker 1: But he was such a low level schmuck, the fact
Speaker 1: that they would suggest, hey, you're the one we want
Speaker 1: to kill.
Speaker 2: The president of the United States, and we know from
Speaker 2: our business it may not have been a guy a
Speaker 2: KGB officer saying go shoot him, but a KGB officer saying,
Speaker 2: if only he were gone. There's all sorts of ways
Speaker 2: short of paying him money to do this.
Speaker 1: Man, you are you were going down the rabbit hole,
Speaker 1: Jerry Are No, I'm the different help tree.
Speaker 2: The difference Betwe is like, I can see that as
Speaker 2: a possibility, but it's completely unproven. It's total conjecture. I
Speaker 2: get that well.
Speaker 5: And I think you raise a good point, which is
Speaker 5: that the Warrant report has good reason to tamp down
Speaker 5: any suggestion that Oswald was working on behalf of the Russians,
Speaker 5: because if they said he was, then we could be
Speaker 5: at war. And I think John's pointed a I would
Speaker 5: assume the Russians had better people than this, you know,
Speaker 5: incompetent to pull this off. And the other thing is,
Speaker 5: if you look at the geopolitics at the time. After
Speaker 5: the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had a rap prochemont.
Speaker 5: They both felt that we are the only two people
Speaker 5: who pulled the world back from nuclear holocaust, and in
Speaker 5: sixty three they were working together on a nuclear arms tree.
Speaker 5: There was actually a warming between those two men in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty three. I don't know that the geopolitics at
Speaker 5: the time would have led the Soviet Union to want
Speaker 5: Kennedy killed because he'd be replaced by somebody who was
Speaker 5: more of a hardliner.
Speaker 1: But if you're going down rabbit holes and you're like yes,
Speaker 1: But perhaps the KGB, the CIA had been had been
Speaker 1: embarrassed by Kennedy who didn't support them in the Bay
Speaker 1: of Pigs, and the KGB now thought Khushchef was being weak. Therefore,
Speaker 1: those people could have wanted Even if Khrushchef didn't want
Speaker 1: Kennedy killed, maybe the KGB thought it was worthwhile, or
Speaker 1: maybe the CIA wanted Kennedy killed because he wasn't strong enough.
Speaker 1: So that's why this game is interesting, and that's why
Speaker 1: this has stayed on for thirty forty years, because if
Speaker 1: you go take any of these scenarios. They have a
Speaker 1: piece of it that's very interesting, and so of course
Speaker 1: you would want to cover that up.
Speaker 5: In a way, it's a little bit like the religious
Speaker 5: argument of God works in mysterious ways. It's an answer
Speaker 5: to pretty much everything. I don't know that either the
Speaker 5: CIA or the Soviets would have picked Lee Harvey Oswald,
Speaker 5: who was one of life's losers, to pull off the
Speaker 5: biggest event of the century, and there's certainly no evidence
Speaker 5: that they did. And I realized one day, I felt
Speaker 5: I wanted to believe the conspiracy because psychologically this may
Speaker 5: sound counterintuitive. I don't want to believe that one possess
Speaker 5: low life loser can have such a huge, deleterious, damaging
Speaker 5: effect on my life, in the life of my country.
Speaker 5: I'm much more comfortable believing that something this damaging, this
Speaker 5: hugest monumental, could only be pulled off by the most
Speaker 5: powerful forces on earth. Because if a nothing like Oswald
Speaker 5: can have this effect on history, then we're hanging by
Speaker 5: a narrow thread.
Speaker 1: That's why conspiracy are comforting, right, because it helps explain
Speaker 1: unexplainable or complicated or chaotic or random things.
Speaker 3: All Right, we're gonna get right back into that.
Speaker 2: But first let's hear this.
Speaker 1: Did you lose friends, Phil after you came out of
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole? And did you keep all your materials
Speaker 1: and books?
Speaker 5: I did not lose friends after I committed that. I
Speaker 5: lost friends while I was in the rabbit hole because
Speaker 5: I bored people to tears night after the night telling
Speaker 5: them these and connecting assassination theories with the Robert Kennedy
Speaker 5: and the Martin Luther King assassination because there were tenuous
Speaker 5: ties that people would make to that. I think I
Speaker 5: probably I was persona on grata in a lot of
Speaker 5: rooms in the college dormitory because oh God, here comes Phil.
Speaker 5: We're going to be up till three listening to these
Speaker 5: horror stories.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting. On one of our other episodes, we
Speaker 1: had Michael Weissan, who was an expert on Russian intelligence
Speaker 1: written some books on history of Russian active measures and
Speaker 1: disinformation campaigns, and he points out that the JFK movie
Speaker 1: by Oliver Stone was actually part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Speaker 1: In other words, the Russians saw that we were deep
Speaker 1: in these rabbit holes and picked a conspiracy to push
Speaker 1: into different things. Now, back then, we probably didn't have
Speaker 1: the sense of this that we do now to see
Speaker 1: how beautifully evil that is to say, oh, look at
Speaker 1: the Americans are like chasing their tails here, let's throw
Speaker 1: something in the middle of the watch to meet each
Speaker 1: other up.
Speaker 5: I have to say, I mean all of Besonde's movie JFK,
Speaker 5: I think is one of the great movies. I disagree
Speaker 5: with his interpretation of the events, but just as pure
Speaker 5: as filmmaking, I think it's as good as it gets.
Speaker 5: I love that movie.
Speaker 2: One of the things too, that doesn't make any sense
Speaker 2: is conspiracy. Theorists now on the JFK event keep saying
Speaker 2: and hoping that one more there's one more document and
Speaker 2: it will show right. And how many administrations have we
Speaker 2: been through Obama, trum Biden, going back to Trump again,
Speaker 2: if there was a piece of paper that laid out
Speaker 2: this hunting plan. And we've said this before, but just
Speaker 2: to be clear, some of the documents that are still
Speaker 2: being held, one of them that came out was the
Speaker 2: reason we knew Oswald was in the Russian m se
Speaker 2: in Mexico City is because we had this We had
Speaker 2: the embassy bugged and it was against Mexican law, and
Speaker 2: the Mexican president himself said, I will allow you to
Speaker 2: break Mexican law, but I will be in big trouble
Speaker 2: and my legacy will be in big trouble if I
Speaker 2: allow this. So you must promise to keep this secret forever.
Speaker 2: But before that, people are thinking, oh, they're keeping these secrets. Oh,
Speaker 2: this has got to be the one. And then it
Speaker 2: comes out that it basically see, I had just made
Speaker 2: a promise. I come something completely different, and we broke
Speaker 2: our promise and it didn't solve anything.
Speaker 5: Some people lie, some people forget details. But there's one
Speaker 5: thing that prevented us from ever knowing definitively for sure,
Speaker 5: and that is the wounds in Kennedy's neck and the back.
Speaker 5: Doctors at Parkland Hospital saw him lying on his back
Speaker 5: with a hole in the front of his throat. Now,
Speaker 5: the Warren Report says that's the exit wound from the
Speaker 5: bullet that entered his back. The doctors at Parkland Hospital
Speaker 5: never turned him onto his back, They never saw a
Speaker 5: hole in his back, They saw the hole in his throat,
Speaker 5: assumed it was an entry wound, did an emergency tracheotomy
Speaker 5: to try to save his life. He dies. The body
Speaker 5: is shipped to Bethesda Naval hospital for an autopsy. The
Speaker 5: doctors who do the autopsy see a tracheotomy opening in
Speaker 5: the front of his neck and a hole on the
Speaker 5: back of his neck, so they say, okay, the bullet
Speaker 5: entered the back of his neck. They never talked to
Speaker 5: the doctors at Parkland who thought that the hole in
Speaker 5: the front was an entry wound. If the doctor's doing
Speaker 5: the autopsy had been told, hey, there's a possibility that
Speaker 5: there was an entry into the front, they would have
Speaker 5: dissected the entire path of that bullet to see if
Speaker 5: the tissue is pushing from front to back or from
Speaker 5: back to front. They never did that. The body was
Speaker 5: sealed in the coffin lying in state, and only then
Speaker 5: did the two sets of doctors talk to each other
Speaker 5: and was too late to examine it. Because of that
Speaker 5: one missed communication, we don't have the definitive proof that
Speaker 5: the hole in the front of his was an exit word.
Speaker 1: There was a law in nineteen ninety two that stipulates
Speaker 1: that anything that Menson mentions the assassination must be cross
Speaker 1: filed into the JFK material. So in CIA, obviously there
Speaker 1: was such pressure even back then on the agency, like, hey, listen,
Speaker 1: we have to make sure that we keep good records
Speaker 1: of all this stuff. And so they said, any if
Speaker 1: you're anywhere in the world and someone says something about
Speaker 1: the JFK, then has to be cross filed into the
Speaker 1: JFK material and files. And the problem then becomes that
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of sensitive material that has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the assassination in these files. For example, when
Speaker 1: I was in Belgrade and Serbia, I met the former
Speaker 1: head of the Serbian Intelligence Service, and as I was
Speaker 1: sitting down and drinking with him, it turns out he
Speaker 1: was obsessed with the assassination and he talked about it
Speaker 1: for the bulk of the evening of our meeting. So
Speaker 1: therefore I wrote up a meeting with the head of
Speaker 1: the Serbian intelligence Service, and I included the JFK discussion
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with the issues we were doing.
Speaker 1: But then that report gets cross filed into the JFK material.
Speaker 1: So when it comes time to release said they can't
Speaker 1: release it because it has to deal with sensitive issues
Speaker 1: going on and Serbia or what have you. But it
Speaker 1: looks like we were, you know, to the outside, like, oh, look,
Speaker 1: they're not giving up this sensitive JFK material. But it's
Speaker 1: not in fact at all what happened.
Speaker 2: And when we're planning our conspiracies, small conspiracies like an operation, right,
Speaker 2: we always say Murphy gets a vote, And my mind
Speaker 2: goes back to this one operation we were doing, and
Speaker 2: it was a small conspiracy and it's a third world country.
Speaker 2: We had a female officer meeting someone from a radical
Speaker 2: Arab regime and he was thinking about he'd let us know.
Speaker 2: He was thinking of telling us what was going on
Speaker 2: in his government, but he wasn't sure yet, And so
Speaker 2: they arranged for this walk in this park and as
Speaker 2: they were walking through the park this isolated tops of trees,
Speaker 2: police jump out, five or six police and they yell,
Speaker 2: you're under arrest. And she's thinking looking at him, thinking oh,
Speaker 2: he set me up. And he looks at her and thinks, oh,
Speaker 2: she set me up. And they both looked at each
Speaker 2: other and realize nobody set anybody up. And they started
Speaker 2: talking to the police. And I swear to God what
Speaker 2: came out of this was the police said, last year,
Speaker 2: on this date, there was a ritual murder, a witchcraft murder,
Speaker 2: in this exact spot, and we have determined that it
Speaker 2: is likely for halt reasons as a country that believes
Speaker 2: in witchcraft, that the perpetrators would return to this spot
Speaker 2: perfectly with heart of the body that they took. And
Speaker 2: so they talked back and forth, and the police very
Speaker 2: you know, it's like, oh, well, these two clearly are
Speaker 2: not like involved in witchcraft. And she said no, he's
Speaker 2: my tutor. I'm teaching him English. And they went, oh,
Speaker 2: you can go, but don't tell anybody we're here because
Speaker 2: we're waiting for the next people and so and so,
Speaker 2: you know, we planned everything out to be perfectly done,
Speaker 2: and then when we had to send it into Washington,
Speaker 2: it's like, yeah, we didn't think about the pulp murder.
Speaker 2: Witch craft came that right.
Speaker 1: So do you still follow this issue at all? Or
Speaker 1: has coming out of the JFK rabbit hole made you
Speaker 1: someone who's very skeptical of conspiracies in general.
Speaker 5: I did stay in the rabbit hole for a while
Speaker 5: when Vince Bugliosi's book Reclaiming History came out, because I
Speaker 5: think it's brilliant. It's a definitive, exhaustively long examination of
Speaker 5: every conspiracy theory and every piece of supposed evidence that
Speaker 5: supports them, where he examines them very carefully and knocks
Speaker 5: them all down. There's all kinds of things he knocks down.
Speaker 5: For instance, the opening of JFK, the film with the
Speaker 5: drug addicted prostitute is thrown out of the car and
Speaker 5: she claims, there's two Cubans on the way to Dallas
Speaker 5: and they told me they were going to kill Kennedy.
Speaker 5: Buugliosi traces tracks that down. There was a woman who
Speaker 5: claimed this, but she claimed it after the assassination, not before.
Speaker 5: The myth was always that it was two days before
Speaker 5: the assassination she was telling people they're going to kill Kennedy.
Speaker 5: It was after. And Bugliosi does this to every piece
Speaker 5: of supposed evidence. But it's it's appealing. I understand the
Speaker 5: appeal of it. It's fun, it's cool. It's cool to say, hey,
Speaker 5: I know something you don't know. The government was lying
Speaker 5: about this. Let me spin this tale. And I love
Speaker 5: a good story. And the assassination conspiracies are really compelling, interesting,
Speaker 5: vital stories. They just happen to be fiction. But I
Speaker 5: like fiction too.
Speaker 1: The issue of how hard it would be before the
Speaker 1: fact to arrange something, as opposed to after the fact
Speaker 1: putting it together. You put together sort of a small
Speaker 1: example of like if someone was trying to plan this,
Speaker 1: and someone was querying them what that might look like,
Speaker 1: and you sent that to us, I was wonder if
Speaker 1: it would be worthwhile reading that through to try to
Speaker 1: help make that point.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 5: Sure. The idea is that instead of looking back at
Speaker 5: the assassination from today, let's put ourselves in the middle
Speaker 5: of October of nineteen sixty three and the three of
Speaker 5: us are sitting together in Dallas. You're my case officers,
Speaker 5: you're my handlers. You have entrusted me with the planning
Speaker 5: of the Kennedy assassination. By the way, where would we
Speaker 5: be meeting in a hotel room or somebody's house? Where
Speaker 5: would this take place? Hotel room would be just fine, okay,
Speaker 5: And I'm going to lay out for you the plan
Speaker 5: that I've come up with, and I would start by saying, Okay,
Speaker 5: we just got word Kennedy is coming to Dallas in
Speaker 5: late November, and we're going to kill him. We've got
Speaker 5: a guy, Lee Harvey Osworth, and he's a professional assassin. No,
Speaker 5: he's just some guy who works in a warehouse.
Speaker 1: But he's been a hit man.
Speaker 2: Was he military?
Speaker 5: Yes, he was a marine how'd that work out? Not
Speaker 5: so good? He was court martialed for accidentally shooting himself
Speaker 5: a lot terrific.
Speaker 1: So has he ever shot anyone other than himself?
Speaker 5: Well, he shot at someone. I remember it was in
Speaker 5: all the papers earlier this year that someone took a
Speaker 5: shot at that guy, General Walker. Yeah, yeah, well that
Speaker 5: was Lee. But he missed. Okay, he missed, but he
Speaker 5: did shoot at him.
Speaker 2: Is it a hard shot?
Speaker 5: No, it was actually a pretty easy shot. Walker was
Speaker 5: sitting in a chair at home. It was nighttime, perfectly lit.
Speaker 5: Oswald was outside thirty yards away. Why did he miss
Speaker 5: He was using this piece of crap mail order rifle.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, So for Trinity, we'll get him a really
Speaker 1: good sniper rifle.
Speaker 5: No, he's going to use the same piece of crap
Speaker 5: mail order rifle.
Speaker 2: What did he do after the route?
Speaker 5: He defected to Russia.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, it sounded like you said he defected to Russia.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he defected to Russia, but he changed his mind
Speaker 5: and we let him back, so the authorities know he
Speaker 5: defected to Russia and came back to the United States. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Are you a teeny bit concerned that he might be
Speaker 1: on a watch list? Or something.
Speaker 5: Oh, he's on a watch list, are right, it's one
Speaker 5: of the reasons he's pissed off at the government. The
Speaker 5: FBI is always coming around interrogating him, his wife, his family,
Speaker 5: his friends.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, So why the hell are we using this guy?
Speaker 5: Because he works at the Texas school Book Depository. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so from the sixth floor window, he will have a
Speaker 5: perfect shot if the presidential limo goes down Elm the street.
Speaker 1: What do you mean if the residential limo goust down
Speaker 1: Elm Street.
Speaker 5: They haven't announced the President's I tinerary yet, they haven't
Speaker 5: even announced where he's gonna speak. And truth be told,
Speaker 5: there's no reason to believe he'll drive by there.
Speaker 1: But if he does, if the president doesn't drive down Elm.
Speaker 5: Street, honestly, we haven't thought about that yet.
Speaker 2: Okay, walk me through how this goes down. The morning
Speaker 2: of the presidential motorcade, Oswald drives to work.
Speaker 5: And no, no, he doesn't drive. What do you mean
Speaker 5: he doesn't have a car. He doesn't even have a license.
Speaker 1: How is he gonna get to work?
Speaker 5: Probably just hitch your ride as a neighbor.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I guess you'll stash the rifle at the building.
Speaker 5: So when he arrives, no, no, noly, he's gonna carry
Speaker 5: the rifle with him in his neighbor's car.
Speaker 2: And the neighbor says like, hey, Lee, why are you
Speaker 2: carrying a rifle to work on the day the president
Speaker 2: is driving by your building?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Come on, he's not gonna carry it in the open,
Speaker 5: but do you think we're stupid? He's gonna wrap it
Speaker 5: in paper?
Speaker 2: Hey, Lee, why are you carrying a rifle shaped object
Speaker 2: wrapped in paper on the day the President is driving?
Speaker 5: Guy, Well, mister smarty pants, we actually have an answer
Speaker 5: for that. He's going to say. It's curtain rods.
Speaker 2: Hey Lee, why are you carrying curtain rods to work?
Speaker 5: Okay, that's a good question. I'll run it by Lee.
Speaker 5: I'm sure he'll think of something.
Speaker 1: Oh good, sir, he's smart, savvy.
Speaker 5: No, he's stupid. But maybe i'll have the guy's work on.
Speaker 1: All right, So let me see if I've got this.
Speaker 1: This not very smart guy, who's not a very good shot,
Speaker 1: who is being watched by the FBI, is going to
Speaker 1: position himself to shoot the president if the President drives
Speaker 1: on that street, which right now, we have no Reasonablie
Speaker 1: he will.
Speaker 5: That's our plan.
Speaker 2: Then what what do you mean after he shoots the president?
Speaker 2: Then what what's your escape plan? How do you get
Speaker 2: him away from the scene of the crime. How do
Speaker 2: you get him out of the city, out of the country.
Speaker 2: What's the plan?
Speaker 5: Well, I think Lee was just planning to go back
Speaker 5: to his apartment. Maybe take in a movie, take in
Speaker 5: a movie. Oh, I get it. You're worried he's going
Speaker 5: to get arrested, and if he gets arrested, he could
Speaker 5: talk and that could implicate us. Yes, worried about that.
Speaker 5: Don't worry. We're gonna kill him, Thank.
Speaker 2: God, that's the first sensible thing you said. You're going
Speaker 2: to kill him before the police find him.
Speaker 5: No, we're gonna kill him after the police find.
Speaker 2: Him, before they interrogate him, right before he has chance
Speaker 2: to say anything.
Speaker 5: No, we're gonna let them interrogate him for a few days,
Speaker 5: and then we're gonna kill him where right there in
Speaker 5: the police.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 1: One of the cops will say Oswald grabbed his gun
Speaker 1: and there was a scuffle.
Speaker 5: And there won't be a cop. We got this guy,
Speaker 5: Jack Rup and he's a hitman. No, he owns his
Speaker 5: strip club, but he's killed people before. Jack, he's a
Speaker 5: pussy gut.
Speaker 1: How is he gonna do this?
Speaker 5: He's gonna walk into that police station and march right
Speaker 5: up to Oswald, pull out his gun.
Speaker 2: And think, and he can do this without being seen.
Speaker 5: Hell no, he's gonna do it on live television. What oh,
Speaker 5: I get what you're worried about? What if they arrest him?
Speaker 5: Will he talk?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a concern.
Speaker 5: Don'n't worry.
Speaker 2: We're gonna kill him to cook, thank you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, about three years later, we're gonna give him cancer.
Speaker 1: Three years later, too long a little.
Speaker 5: I sense you're a tiny bit skeptical about Plan A,
Speaker 5: So let me run Plan B by. In Plan B,
Speaker 5: Oswald is not the only shooter. He'll be up there
Speaker 5: on the sixth floor, just like Plan A, but we'll
Speaker 5: also have a real, highly experienced professional assassin, let's call
Speaker 5: him Harlows, and he'll be on the grassyno.
Speaker 1: Good, Okay, now you're talking. What's the grassy knoll.
Speaker 5: It's a little slope next to Oswald's building. Carlos will
Speaker 5: be at the back of the grassyno.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what's the player.
Speaker 5: The President's limo will drive right past the grassy knoll
Speaker 5: at a perfect ninety degree angle, and Carlos will shoot him.
Speaker 5: Then we say, hey, there's a guy in the sixth
Speaker 5: story window behind the president with a rifle. Everyone will
Speaker 5: go after Lee and he'll take the fall.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, So Carlos is going to shoot Kennedy from
Speaker 1: the side at almost ground level, but you're gonna say
Speaker 1: the real shooter was six stories up and behind.
Speaker 5: Yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: I can't believe I have to ask this, But if
Speaker 2: Carlos shoots Kennedy from the side and it almost ground level,
Speaker 2: how are you going to make the wounds look like
Speaker 2: they came from behind and six stories up.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you exactly how. Carlos is gonna shoot Kennedy
Speaker 5: in the front of the throat, but he's not gonna
Speaker 5: kill him, so they'll rush into the hospital. They'll do
Speaker 5: an emergency trachey out of me and that will obliterate
Speaker 5: the entry wounds in the front of his throat. But
Speaker 5: here's the brilliant part. Oswald will shoot him in the
Speaker 5: back of the head at the same time that Carlos
Speaker 5: shoots him in the front of the throat. So when
Speaker 5: they do the autopsy, they won't see an entry wound
Speaker 5: in his throat because it's been obliterated by the trachy
Speaker 5: out of him. But they will see the entry wound
Speaker 5: in the back of his head, and they'll say it
Speaker 5: was only one assassin. He was the guy shooting from behind,
Speaker 5: and we put it on the lead pretty good.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Just one thing. If Carlos is shooting from the grassy
Speaker 1: knoll at a ninety degree angle to Kennedy, in other words,
Speaker 1: from the side, how does he hit him in the front.
Speaker 2: Of the throat?
Speaker 5: You are so negative?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: So that's our little.
Speaker 5: That's pretty much how it could have gone down. But
Speaker 5: it's a dumb plan. I think we can agree on that.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back in a moment.
Speaker 1: Jerry and I are concerned about going so deep in
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole because it becomes such an industry. But
Speaker 1: if you just go back to the like, okay, playing
Speaker 1: this out for me, it all seems to fall apart.
Speaker 1: All the clever things fall apart pretty quickly.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And also then if you think specifically about was
Speaker 5: it the KGB, was it the mafia, you always have
Speaker 5: to come back to would they have hired Lee Harvey Oswald,
Speaker 5: a guy who failed at everything in his life.
Speaker 1: We would speak about conspiracies and myths. There's a view
Speaker 1: out there that there are professional assassins roaming the earth
Speaker 1: that can be just found via certain dark web or
Speaker 1: whatever it is. I think one of the little secrets
Speaker 1: of law enforcement is that actually, these professional assassins don't exist.
Speaker 1: There isn't a crew of people who make their living
Speaker 1: off of killing people. There's crappy, low level criminals who
Speaker 1: are willing to do something for money and maybe get
Speaker 1: themselves caught. But there's a notion that there's these incredibly
Speaker 1: skilled professionals. Like in the Day of the Jackal or
Speaker 1: what have you just done?
Speaker 5: Was there Carlos? Was there? Carlos?
Speaker 1: He was a terrorist? Yes, he wasn't really a Carlos.
Speaker 1: A jackal had a cool name.
Speaker 5: But the guy who Day of the Jackal was about
Speaker 5: the guy who tried to kill de Gaul? Was that
Speaker 5: a real personal thing?
Speaker 2: So no, But there were conspiracies. So that go back.
Speaker 2: De Gaul gave or withdrew the French from Algeria, where
Speaker 2: they'd been for one hundred and forty years, and inside
Speaker 2: of two months, over a million French had to like
Speaker 2: bandon Algeria, where they'd been for generations, and those people,
Speaker 2: the Piagnois, they had put together over and over again
Speaker 2: conspiracies to real conspiracies to kill de gaul and they
Speaker 2: all failed. I think the book and the movie were great,
Speaker 2: but there never really was a Jackal, that the oas
Speaker 2: the underground piegnoits resistance to the Gal, that none of
Speaker 2: them ever panned out. Now, these people were professional military
Speaker 2: and the French Foreign Legion guys, and they were unable
Speaker 2: to do it. So, Phil you famously did Sneakers and
Speaker 2: about CIA, and I was wondering, what is your sense
Speaker 2: of the role of CIA now in US politics?
Speaker 5: Is that, first, I say, Sneakers is more about the NSA.
Speaker 5: Some of all fears, which I directed, is certainly about
Speaker 5: the CIA. My sense, and I as an outsider, is
Speaker 5: that the agency has, like everything else in American society,
Speaker 5: has gone through a lot of changes. I think that
Speaker 5: in the fifties and sixties it was probably less bound
Speaker 5: by laws and rules and was more free flowing. It
Speaker 5: was the guy, the OSS guys who were cowboys in
Speaker 5: some ways, and I think they way overstepped the bounds.
Speaker 5: My guess is that today it's much much more difficult
Speaker 5: for the agency to break the law, and that the
Speaker 5: role is much more about intelligence gathering then the way
Speaker 5: the movies depicted, which is about cloak and dagger. And
Speaker 5: I've learned from you guys that I think the first
Speaker 5: time we talked and you corrected me said, we're not
Speaker 5: CIA agents, We're officers. We're not spies. We recruit spies,
Speaker 5: we run spies, but we're not out there with the
Speaker 5: binoculars at the edge of the nuclear base trying to
Speaker 5: break in. I actually went to the CIA where we
Speaker 5: were prepping some of all fears, and went to the
Speaker 5: Russia desk, and what really struck me was it looked
Speaker 5: like it could be the Russian studies office at some
Speaker 5: mid sized university. It was a room of desks. All
Speaker 5: the desks had books and magazines, and everybody had little
Speaker 5: nesting dolls from their trips to Russia, and everybody had
Speaker 5: little bottles of vodka. And some of the people were
Speaker 5: watching Russian cable television, must monitoring television. Others were reading magazines.
Speaker 5: And I realized this is the unglamorous, most important work
Speaker 5: that the agency does, which is intelligence gather and a
Speaker 5: lot of that intelligence is gathered from public sources, just
Speaker 5: watching what's available and say, oh, that guy didn't used
Speaker 5: to stand next to that guy. What does that mean?
Speaker 5: And it was really based on that trip that we
Speaker 5: added a scene to the movie where they're watching their
Speaker 5: Russian president and some newsreel footage and someone says, oh,
Speaker 5: his jacket isn't fitting well, I wonder if he's like
Speaker 5: losing weight, you know. And that guy he was standing
Speaker 5: next to him at the conference in Vienna. No, that's
Speaker 5: not that guy. That was a different guy. And it's
Speaker 5: all these people just arguing as they would in a
Speaker 5: college dorm. But when we entered that office, as you
Speaker 5: guys know this, if you walk down the hallway and
Speaker 5: a door opens, what you see is an interior wall
Speaker 5: that blocks the view of that room. You have to
Speaker 5: walk in through the door, walk around this little interior
Speaker 5: wall to get into the room, so that anybody walking
Speaker 5: down the hall can't see anybody in those rooms. And
Speaker 5: I said that was cool.
Speaker 1: In the early days of CAA, when people talked about
Speaker 1: it was a rogue elephant, or it got involved in
Speaker 1: illegal things or over through countries. It was often because
Speaker 1: it did not have congressional oversight in those type of things.
Speaker 1: It was essentially a plaything of the president. Eisenhower would
Speaker 1: just say that head a CIA. It would really helped me.
Speaker 1: If you I'm getting pressure from United Fruit, can you
Speaker 1: go into wherever it did Hondurst or something and overthrow
Speaker 1: those people. And they just acted on behalf of President's whims.
Speaker 1: And what I worry now is newly elected President Trump
Speaker 1: is he wants an organization that works specifically for him.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want outside interference, he doesn't want the Congress involved,
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to have to justify or he's doing.
Speaker 1: He wants it to be his weapon. And we spent
Speaker 1: a lot of years changing, adapting, and reforming the intelligence
Speaker 1: community to be responsive to the will of the people
Speaker 1: and the Congress and the president. And I worry we
Speaker 1: might be going back to that old thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Years ago, I was researching the Cuban missile crisis. I
Speaker 5: did a huge amount of research into it for a
Speaker 5: mini series. And one of the things that really impressed
Speaker 5: me is that in the summer of nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 5: we knew there was a Russian military build up in Cuba,
Speaker 5: but everybody said it's not nuclear, including the CIA analysts,
Speaker 5: But It was the Director of Central Intelligence who was
Speaker 5: the one person who said to Kennedy, I think it's nuclear,
Speaker 5: and his analysts had told him, no, it's not. And
Speaker 5: he said, look, I'll let you guys submit your report
Speaker 5: as it is, but I'm just going to tell the
Speaker 5: President that I have a different opinion. And it was
Speaker 5: based on one thing. He said, these anti aircraft emplacements
Speaker 5: that the Russians are putting in Cuba are all in circles,
Speaker 5: but there's nothing in the middle of those circles. He said,
Speaker 5: I think those will someday have nuclear launch pads in
Speaker 5: the middle of those circular array of anti aircraft emplacements.
Speaker 1: And so they set the U two's up to go. Look,
Speaker 1: that was a director McCahon, I think.
Speaker 5: The Director mccon, who was a Republican Eisenhower administration official.
Speaker 5: And what's interesting is after he told Kennedy this and
Speaker 5: Kennedy said, okay, sent up more two's. Macone goes to
Speaker 5: the south of France for his honeymoon. He spends all
Speaker 5: of August in France, and when he comes back, he says,
Speaker 5: what are the U two's found? And they go, oh,
Speaker 5: the weather hasn't been good. We couldn't send them up,
Speaker 5: and so it's not until the end of September early
Speaker 5: October when the weather clears and they can send U
Speaker 5: two's and then also send those low level fighter photography planes.
Speaker 5: And that's what comes up with.
Speaker 1: And what also happened simultaneously is is that Clendestine Service,
Speaker 1: the part where Jerry and I worked, had a really
Speaker 1: successful spy in Moscow. One of our first senior gru
Speaker 1: military intelligence spi is named Penkowski, who provided us a
Speaker 1: lot of the military books and doctrine, and so we
Speaker 1: were able to look at how those forces had arrayed
Speaker 1: themselves and look at their official doctrine and realize, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is a setup for a nuclear thing.
Speaker 1: So the human spy who gave us information allowed the
Speaker 1: U two and others that went over to put those
Speaker 1: pieces together and realize what was happening there.
Speaker 5: There's a great moment to the night that the photo
Speaker 5: analysts call the National Security Advisor to say there's nuclear
Speaker 5: emplacements going into Cuba. It's a Sunday night and McGeorge
Speaker 5: Bundy is having a cocktail party at his house and
Speaker 5: he gets this phone call from someone at CIA. It
Speaker 5: wasn't the director somebody below him. It's an unsecured phone,
Speaker 5: and so the guy says, doesn't say who it is.
Speaker 5: He says, you know those things we were talking about,
Speaker 5: and Bundy recognizes the voices he asked and he goes,
Speaker 5: they're there.
Speaker 1: Phil. It's always fantastic talking to you. We love meeting
Speaker 1: with you and talking to you. And you've had an
Speaker 1: incredible career and little did we know you had this JFKP.
Speaker 1: So thank you for spending time with us.
Speaker 5: It's always my pleasure. I always learned so much from
Speaker 5: talk to.
Speaker 7: About Thanks so much for Mission Implausible is produced by
Speaker 7: Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The
Speaker 7: associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production
Speaker 7: of Honorable Mention and Abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.