The JFK Assassination – a Debate with Jefferson Morley and Mark Zaid (Part 1)
Erin Dietrick: Welcome to "SpyCast", the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm Erin Dietrick and your host is Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Every week we explore some aspect of the past, present, or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review. Coming up next on "SpyCast".
Jefferson Morley: That's why I think they probably have something to hide. Because it doesn't make sense otherwise. Because I think if they had -- if they had a true story, like you're saying, like, Yeah, we watched him, but, you know, we made a mistake. If they had access to that kind of, you know, straightforward story, we would get that. [ Music ]
Erin Dietrick: This week's episode is a friendly debate on the Kennedy assassination. Andrew moderated a conversation between intelligence author and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley, and veteran "SpyCast" guest and national security attorney Mark Zaid. They've both got an incredible wealth of knowledge on the assassination, but differing views on what actually went down on November 22nd, 1963. In this episode, the trio discuss the lasting questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald's intelligence connections, the Warren Commission and the JFK assassination records, and the strangest theories they've heard, and the most plausible explanations of the assassination. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are "SpyCast". Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. [ Sound effects ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So, thanks ever so much for joining me to speak about JFK. The idea for this actually came because I've been listening to this Rob Reiner podcast on JFK, which I'm sure that you may have came across. And I just want to open this up.
Mark Zaid: Okay.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: As it's been called the mother of all conspiracy theories.
Mark Zaid: Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So let's dig into it.
Mark Zaid: Okay.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So I think a good place to start is how did you first get into this? How did you first become interested in this particular topic? So maybe we can start with you, Jeff.
Jefferson Morley: Well, so my knowledge starts when I was in kindergarten in St. Louis and this big event happened, which I didn't have any understanding of. And a lot of people at my house watching TV. That's all I remember, and I don't remember anything else about it. I majored in American history. I didn't think anything particularly about the Kennedy assassination at that time. In the 1980s, when I went into journalism, I began to read some books, and I was never very impressed with any of them. I didn't know what to think. It seemed like it was way in the past. So, really I only started to pay attention in 1992 when Congress passed the JFK Records Act, which mandated all these records from the various investigations be made public. And when that happened, I realized there was going to be a whole lot of information that would be genuinely new. And it wasn't about -- for me, it wasn't about solving the assassination or pursuing a theory. It was like, there's all this stuff out there and there's going to be good stories. I'd been covering the CIA mostly in the context of CIA in Central America, CIA in the Iran-Contra affair. Those were stories I covered in the '80s. So I knew a lot about the CIA by 1992 when this law passed, and I realized there was going to be lots of information. So that's really when I began to dig into it professionally and look for stories that hadn't been told before.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And Mark?
Mark Zaid: So I am younger by a few years than Jeff, so I was born after the assassination, but my involvement actually predated Jeff, because I do recall being in the mid-1970s as probably like an 8 or 10 year old, going to the library and reading books about the Kennedy assassination. And I remember looking through the Warren Commission hearings, and I specifically remember Tink Thompson's book, "Six Seconds in Dallas", which was written in 1967 when I was born. And I remember calling a man named David Lipton, who unfortunately passed away recently, who wrote a book in 1981 called "Best Evidence", which is one of the theories that somewhat out there as far as body snatching. But actually I've always liked David over the years and was very friendly with him. And I called him when I was in high school to talk to him about the Kennedy assassination. I think back and I'm sure I asked, like, really dumb, naive questions as, like, a 16, 17 year old. But my honors thesis in college was on the Kennedy assassination. And then as a law student, I had spent more time on the case than I did in my legal studies, which actually was a very pivotal time in my life to decide I didn't want to do that any longer. But I got to know a lot of the authors of Kennedy assassination books as well as government -- former government investigators and lawyers, and people who were tied to the case which we can certainly talk about. And I started as a lawyer, young lawyer representing a number of them. That's how I met Jeff. We've known each other for 30 years. I've represented Jeff, we should say. We're going to disagree on a whole bunch of stuff, but we've been friends for decades and worked together.
Jefferson Morley: No, and so, you know, I got interested after 1992, after the JFK Records Act, and right away, by early 1993, new records were already appearing in the National Archives. So you could go and get your hands on these things very quickly. And while I was doing that, I knew Mark, and he came to me one day and he said, Jeff, I got a client, and it's a great story, maybe you want to write about it. And that was Michael Scott, the son of Win Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City. I wrote an article for the Post, but I became friends with Michael and Mark, and realized this was just a great story. It was much more than a, you know, one-shot article in The Washington Post. That Win Scott was a charismatic spy. He was a very powerful, you know, kind of pro-consul almost in Mexico for a decade. Very important figure in the history of the CIA, not well known at all. And so that led to my first book, "Our Man in Mexico". So this is when we got going and, you know, Mark really helped me with that, you know. That entree was key. You know, Michael was a great friend. They had already accumulated an incredible collection of, you know, memoirs, photos, documents, letters, you know, the stuff that's really gold when you're writing a book.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: I was just thinking there, how very quaint and old fashion to disagree and still be friends [laughter]. It's so out of fashion these days, right?
Mark Zaid: And there are times, this community -- and we could tell some war stories for sure. I mean, I remember, I've been yelled at by people there. You can see the writing on the wall. People are really Invested in this. And it's not just this conspiracy theory. We can talk a lot of different conspiracy theories where the unfortunate is some people get so invested in it, they won't budge off of their theory no matter what information comes out. And that has been a problem. And I remember when I was in law school and I was far more conspiratorial at that time, and doing a lot of writing and researching and reading and public speaking. And then I did -- I was on a panel in Dallas for the 30th anniversary in 1993. And one of the panels was on the intelligence connections to Lee Harvey Oswald. And I went through 20 pieces of evidence that people had held out to be -- to show he was intel. And I gave what I would say is reasonable explanations to show that it didn't mean anything. Didn't mean that he wasn't intel. I wasn't disproving it. I was just addressing specific theories. And I remember a guy who I had been very close friends with. Literally, if you remember "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", either movie, the '56 or the '79 version, where when they had been taken over by the Peapods, and they know you're not a Peapod, right, they would point their finger at -- their arm-extended finger, and scream. And this guy who had been my friend was screaming at me over by the overpass where some people think shots were fired from and stuff like that. Screaming at me that I was CIA because I dared challenge some of the theories.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, so the whole discourse around the Kennedy assassination has become very distorted. I mean, first this kind of, you know, tribalism that you're talking about, that if you disagree with me, you're the enemy. People do become very invested. It becomes linked to other conspiratorial scenarios which I try to resist. You know, I try and take each story separately as it develops. And it's, you know, it's really unfortunate. To me, what's happened is, you know, the debate is kind of ending. You know, I posted a couple of news stories this year. One of them got picked up by The New York Times about the guy who was reading Oswald's mail before the assassination. But, you know, people, they've decided what they're going to think and new facts don't make that much of a difference. So getting all of the records I think is very important. Another thing that the Archives is working on and is in their new budget is the complete digitization of the JFK collection in the National Archives, which would be a huge step forward. And I think they have put that in their next budget.
Mark Zaid: I mean, that's -- that would be fantastic. I remember when I was helping in the last few years to get the Trump and Biden administrations to release the remaining documents that were releasable, there's still some and we can talk about it as far as what's still out there that's being withheld. But I came across one document that it wasn't about the assassination per se, but it was created I think in the mid '60s, and it listed all the CIA station chiefs in Moscow, from basically Oswald's tenure in Moscow. He was there from '59 in Russia, in Soviet Union, '59 to '62, and I think it went from, like, '59 to '65.
Jefferson Morley: Right.
Mark Zaid: And, you know, that's -- it doesn't say anything about the assassination, but it's very helpful and interesting for us to know who were the top CIA officials in the Soviet Union during the time when Oswald defected and lived there, and it will become very relevant as we talk, and especially if Jeff talks about some of his work that he's done on the CIA. So there was one name redacted, someone who was there from, like, '62 to '63. And the others were all, it was about five or six of them. And I was thinking, Wow, this is really interesting. Why, why would -- I looked up all the others. I mean, I knew some of their names. They were all dead, so there's one reason why to release their names, they're all deceased, no privacy interests. Could this one guy, I mean, assuming to be a man, there weren't female station chiefs at that time, could this one guy still be alive? Or regardless, would he have been in a position perhaps later on where he was still covert, where his affiliation with the CIA still can't be revealed, depending on what work he did. And I thought that was a fascinating research question, so I posted it into I think a smaller part of this group. And lo and behold, I think within hours, someone came up with a different version of the same document.
Jefferson Morley: That wasn't redacted.
Mark Zaid: It wasn't redacted.
Jefferson Morley: This happens all the time.
Mark Zaid: All the time. And when I looked him up, the guy died almost 20 years ago, in, like, 2004. He was totally publicly open. Someone screwed up in the redactions. That's all it was. It wasn't a massive secret or conspiracy in that sense. Somebody screwed up.
Jefferson Morley: You know, but I doubt that sometimes because I think that they keep the names secret because they don't want people like us talking to the descendants and getting the story. And so for example, one of the stories that came out in the past year that I thought was highly significant. The CIA conducted its own investigation of Kennedy's murder in the Miami station. And a memo surfaced declassified in its entirety for the first time in December 2022, which identified the officer who said, Yeah, after Kennedy was killed, my bosses called me and said talk to your Cuban contacts and ask them these questions. And lots of officers in the station were asked that. Well, we got that memo in 2022. The guy had died in 2017. You know, if his name had been released, we could have gone to him and said what was going on here. So right now, we know there was an investigation. Donald Heath wrote about it in detail in his memo, and I checked with people on this list. A couple people forward -- came forward and said, Oh, look at this document, somebody else talked about that investigation. This guy talked about that investigation. So we know the CIA investigated the Kennedy assassination in the Miami station. We know they didn't believe the lone gunman scenario, not for a second. They weren't investigating Oswald. They weren't investigating communists. Their prime suspects were anti-Castro Cubans in South Florida. And here's the thing. We got the document. We know there was an investigation. The CIA never shared the results with anybody, so we don't know what they concluded, but I conclude they couldn't corroborate the lone gunman theory, and so they just buried the whole thing. So, you know, what's going on with the withholding of these records? I agree with Mark. Most of it's trivial. Most of it's, you know, it's things like this. It's like somebody made a mistake, it could have been released a long time ago. But if you look at the pattern of deception over the years and especially what we've learned, I just think you can't assume an innocent explanation. They don't -- the CIA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore because they've made so many false statements.
Mark Zaid: But let's kind of give an overview of some of what we need to talk about as -- from a 30,000-foot view in this session One is what if any -- what is the role or connection of the CIA to the assassination?
Jefferson Morley: Right.
Mark Zaid: Now, that could be obviously for some who believe the CIA killed President Kennedy, and that is something we can talk about. But I'm talking more big picture of the CIA has its fingerprints all throughout the assassination. Not in the sense of perpetrating it, again, a theory, but connections to Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a defector to the Soviet Union. There were people he was connected to who have CIA connections. For all who watched the movie "JFK" by Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison in prosecuting Clay Shaw, Clay Shaw had connections to the CIA. I mean, there's all sorts of -- Jeff talks about anti-Castro Cubans. Well, obviously the Bay of Pigs, the CIA trying to kill Castro and President Kennedy trying to accomplish that. So what, if anything, does the CIA's role in connecting to the assassination and the players associated with the assassination, what does that all mean? Has the CIA covered something up? Did they -- what investigation did they do? What were their conclusions? So there's all these big, sort of like the topic for today is, What is the intelligence connections to the assassination of President Kennedy, if any.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So there's a whole variety of things that I would like to follow up on, including what do we mean by conspiracy and you spoke about intent. You know, the mistake, sometimes people are seeing intent when none exists and other times they don't see it when it does exist. So there's a whole variety of things that we can pull on. But I feel like at the minute, let's just get our cards on the table. Let's not bury the lede any longer. So November 22nd, 1963, what's both of your takes on what happened that day? Let's just put the cards on the table and then we'll kind of unpack it after that. So let's start with you, Jeff. What happened that day?
Jefferson Morley: I think the president was ambushed by his enemies in Dallas, who had the ability to make the crime look like something else. And I think that's the fundamental takeaway that I have now. Who was it? I don't know. There's some people who are plausible suspects, but, you know, nothing that rise. I mean, I would even hesitate to, you know, mention their names in a story in terms of saying, you know, That person, you know, conspired to kill the president. The evidence is -- it's not -- the evidence doesn't support that kind of claim, but I think the evidence does support that big picture of what happened.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And if you were shooting the breeze down the pub with your friends, who would you point the finger at? Well, so pretend we're not coming up with the evidence you would need for a Washington Post story or for Mark to go to court. You're just shooting the breeze.
Mark Zaid: Just make sure they're dead so they don't sue you.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: You've got a lawyer here.
Jefferson Morley: Senior people in the CIA and Pentagon are the type of people who had the ability and the desire to mount this kind of operation. People who feared Kennedy's policies, thought that they were unconstitutional and a menace to national security, who felt that they would be defending the country by eliminating Kennedy's policies. But, you know, beyond that, you know, who's the intellectual author? Whose idea was it? You know, if my premise is correct, we're talking about a CIA intelligence operation that was, you know, designed with plausibility -- plausible deniability built into it. That's what a CIA operation is. So of course there's always going to be a plausibly -- plausible way to deny it. You know, this is part of the problem of sorting out the evidence. And so you are left to speculate a little bit or like, you know, like I'm being. You just have to be vague, because we don't have that kind of granular detail.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Okay, Mark. What happened on November 22, 1963?
Mark Zaid: Yes, so President Kennedy was assassinated.
Jefferson Morley: That's for sure.
Mark Zaid: We know that. That we can at least hopefully agree on. He's not living on a beach with Elvis somewhere, though I have Weekly World News articles that say that actually, from back in the early '90s as I recall.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah.
Mark Zaid: So look, I go by evidence. I do believe, and I'm an Occam's razor type of guy, you know, the simplest explanation is usually the best. I do believe that the evidence shows that Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed the president. I do not see I will say viable or persuasive evidence that there were others involved. That doesn't mean I don't have questions. I'd like to know who one of the Dallas police officers encountered behind the grassy knoll fence who claimed they were Secret Service. I've represented Secret Service agents who were in the motorcade, two of them who were in the follow-up car behind the president. There were no Secret Service agents who were on -- not in the motorcade. Now, there are viable explanations I think to explain it, but we've never had anybody come forward and say, I was the person back there. So there are definitely questions. The problem of course with this type of case is there are a lot of other peripheral issues. Allen Dulles, who was a former CIA director fired by Kennedy, sits as a member of the Warren Commission, withholds valuable information from the other commission members about the plots to kill Castro. And you can look at it from two different ways. Is that a conspiracy because the CIA was involved with the assassination of the President of the United States? Or was that Allen Dulles protecting the CIA from making sure the other members didn't know about the plots at the time? You know, can you tie those two together? Is there any connection between any of that? I look at, I, again, to get into perplexion discussions with my girlfriend all the time because it annoys me in television and movie shows where all of a sudden, like, someone's driving along and it's daytime and then the next scene, it's nighttime. And I'm like, Where did all those hours go, right? Because they just moved from one point to the next because nothing important happened in that time period. Well, to me, that's what I see a lot in the Kennedy assassination, where people too often are filling in those few hours between daytime and nighttime and coming up with whatever they think their evidence might be. [ Music ]
Erin Dietrick: In this episode, we speak a lot about the unknowns and unanswered questions that surround the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In this interlude, I want to remind listeners of the facts of what we know to be, without a doubt, absolutely true. So, here's the bare bones timeline of November 22, 1963. By the fall of 1963, Kennedy and his team were planning to prepare for a re-election campaign in 1964. President Kennedy, the First Lady, and Vice President Johnson, among others, embarked on a two-day, five-city tour of Texas, a critical state to win in 1964. On Friday morning, November 22, thousands of Texans gathered outside Kennedy's hotel in Fort Worth as he emerged and gave some brief words. He returned back inside and spoke at a breakfast of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. They left the hotel for Carswell Air Force Base, where they would board for a 13-minute plane ride to Dallas. They arrived in Dallas at Love Field, where they were again greeted by an excited crowd of Texans. Jackie was gifted a bouquet of red roses, and the Kennedys were seated in the back seat of an open convertible, directly behind Texas Governor John Connally and his wife. Headed for the President's next engagement, the motorcade then departed on a 10-mile route through Dallas. It's estimated that over 200,000 crowded the streets of Dallas to see the parade. Around 12:30 p.m., the motorcade turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza. As they took a left onto Elm Street and passed the Texas School Book Depository, shots were heard across the plaza. President Kennedy was struck in the neck and head, and the governor was hit in the back. The car raced to the close-by Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy would be pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Shortly after, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository. Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office at 12:38 p.m., just before Air Force One took off from Love Field carrying the president's body. Those are the bones. Now let's get back to filling in that story. [ Music ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And the most recent figures that I came across were an estimated 320,000 documents relating to the assassination have been released, with just over 4,600 remaining classified. So that's, like, 1.5-ish percent that haven't been declassified. So is that, that could be key potentially? Or what you're saying, Mark, is that you don't think there's anything there that's going to fundamentally change anything, but your point, Jeff, is that there may well be
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, yeah, I would say, yeah. And I should say one other thing to make clear to people. You know, I think that the correct figure now, after June there was another release. I think the correct figure now is about 3,600 documents in the collection of 320,000 documents still contain redactions. That might mean we might have most of the document except for a sentence, a word, a name. In other cases, you know, several pages or, you know, I don't think there's any document that's withheld in its entirety. But, you know, it's still a lot of records. The bulk of those are CIA records. A lot you can tell from the context, like Mark says, stuff about surveillance techniques, covert arrangements with foreign governments. They're very -- they guard those very closely. That's one of the things that they're still keeping. But, you know, why is this necessary? I mean, again, to step back, you know, the JFK Records Act, all this stuff was supposed to be made public in 2017. Judge Tunheim, the head of the review board, I asked him, I said, What did you expect after 25 years? How many records would have to be -- remain secret? And he said, Out of the stuff that I saw, you know, maybe 100 documents. Not, you know, and when in 2017 the CIA and FBI came to Trump and said, We have 14,000 documents that have redactions that we couldn't possibly remove. So it's like, why is the presumption around a Presidential assassination that we're going to keep -- you know, keep these secrets for good? I mean, these agencies must understand that people are incredibly suspicious about that. And this idea, Oh, it's all, you know, cut and dried, one man alone killed the president, please go away. I mean, it's just a majority of people don't buy that. And so the agencies have to have a different position or, you know, they invite suspicion. And I think that's justified.
Mark Zaid: But I do think it's important to note a couple points on that. I mean, one, this is going to be a very small number of documents, and I think hopefully Jeff would agree with this. When Oswald goes to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, we have assets in one or both of those embassies, human assets --
Jefferson Morley: Both.
Mark Zaid: Right? And a good chance that some of those people are still alive because they were only in their 20s. I mean, it was sixty years ago, that sounds like so long ago and it is for us because that was our lifetime. But they were in their twenties, now they're in their mid-to-80s -- if they're alive, they're in their mid-80s or 90s. They still need to be protected, so at least for their identities and maybe surrounding information. Again, small number of information. Interesting with the Trump release, right? All the records were supposed to be released twenty five years after the act, so that was, as Jeff said, 2017. You would have thought Trump would have really pushed for the release. Roger Stone, one of his closest advisers, has written a book about the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. He's a huge conspiracy advocate. Trump of course accused Ted Crude -- Ted Cruz's father of assassinating President Kennedy. And actually I was told by a source that Pompeo, who was the CIA director at the time, went to Trump on, like, the eve roughly of the release and told him not to release it And he did not. Why, we don't know, and he didn't release the documents, a good number of them that were supposed to be. He continued them and then Biden did release some over the course of the next four years.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So I'm just thinking, you know, so even though it may just be over 1% now, you know, that's not to discount that it couldn't be, like, crucial information, right? If it's, like, a will, you know, and it's -- I bequeath all of my money and assets to redacted, I mean, that's, like, important information, right? So it's not to say that just because it's 1% it doesn't mean that it may not be crucial to our understanding of the debate.
Mark Zaid: No, absolutely.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And then I think also I'm wondering to some extent, so MI6, the rationale that they give for never releasing hardly anything ever is that in some countries, historical memory works differently where if your father or grandfather was a quote-unquote snitch or asset or agent of the British or the Americans, then that could stay with the family. It's not --
Mark Zaid: That's why I make the comment about the Cubans.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Zaid: 60 years in Cuba Fidel Castro was gone but I would be quite concerned for the family or the person who was a spy for the US government as an asset in 1963.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So just briefly before we move on to Oswald, because I think Oswald is crucial, discussing him and who he was. I'm just trying to understand the CIA's rationale, and some of this of course is conjecture, so if the effect of keeping this information for 60 years has a gradual public erosion of trust in not just the CIA but the very institutions of government, I mean, it seems like a pyrrhic victory to say, you know, rather than just say, Listen, Oswald was part of an operation. We realize how it looks. We were just keeping the information back because it really doesn't affect the interpretation of the Warren Commission, but we thought that it could potentially complicate it. So we sat on the information, but at some point, you know, we want to release it. Like, it just seems like they're undercutting themselves by sitting on the information if they don't have anything to hide.
Jefferson Morley: I agree. And -- but that's why I think they probably have something to hide because it doesn't make sense otherwise. Because I think if they had -- if they had a true story, like you're saying, like, Yeah, we watched him, but, you know, we made a mistake. If they had access to that kind of, you know, straightforward story, we would get that. But they haven't done that. And to me, that's significant, you know? That the reason -- so I think the reason for the secrecy is to hide something that's very embarrassing or damaging, not something that's exculpatory.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And I'm just wondering as well, and help me understand this question. Like, a CIA director, they have access theoretically, or a President has access theoretically to what's happened in the past. Like surely, you know, people like Stansfield Turner, Bill Casey, these are all -- William Webster, these are all patriotic, upstanding Americans. I mean, surely one of these guys would come along and say, Oh no, no, no, no, you're not -- we're not -- we're not doing this any longer. Like, this has to come out, even if it means that the agency has to be reformed or changed or whatever. I mean, we're talking about a multi-generational conspiracy. Is that what we're talking about?
Mark Zaid: Well, when Bill Clinton came into office, and for those who -- Bill Clinton as a high school student met President Kennedy. There's a famous photo of him I think at the White House or wherever the heck they were in Arkansas, I forget, of, like, shaking his hand or smiling. And it was reported that Bill Clinton had two primary questions he wanted answers as soon as he became President. Are there UFOs, and who killed President Kennedy. And I don't know if he ever got those answers. Somebody could ask -- should ask him now. Obviously he's still alive. But we never got any new information in the time that he was president other than obviously the JFK Records Act, which he signed as president, you know -
Jefferson Morley: No, no, Bush signed it.
Mark Zaid: Bush signed it, sorry.
Jefferson Morley: It was the last one that he did. Yeah, he implemented it.
Mark Zaid: He implemented it, he appointed the board, and it took, like, two years. It took longer than it should have to get the law and the board constituted. No, but there's a lot of that. Clearly there are people in the US government who know more than they're saying, and then the question is why are they withholding the information? Now, I mean, Jeff raises certainly a good point but this is -- the interpretation of it is where the divergence can be. And it's the motivation of withholding information. Let's say that the CIA surveilled Oswald more than it's ever acknowledged.
Jefferson Morley: Right.
Mark Zaid: But, you know, not that it was running Oswald as an agent, which we can talk about because I find that ludicrous personally, and I can say why based on my experience. But let's say they were monitoring him much more so than ever before acknowledged. Why would they withhold that? Especially if, well, look, what's the big deal? It had nothing to do with the assassination. What I have seen in the 30 years, right, I've been representing CIA case officers and senior officials inside the intelligence community, and I'm suing them all the time, right? I'm not an ally to these agencies. I might have respect for them, I enjoy doing the work, but I'm in their face. They do not look at me as a friend, other than I may be friends with individuals. But a lot of times what they did in that case is what they did in other cases. And it's the other cases that they don't want people to know about. So they -- I'm going to make this up. They illegally intercepted Oswald's mail. I mean, we know they intercepted Oswald's mail, but let's say they did something, they illegally wiretapped him, or they had an asset that was gaining information and they don't want it known because maybe that asset was involved with other operations that they wouldn't known. I'm making all of this up just to say I see stuff like that happen all the time. That the cover up, the perceived cover up, is not for the incident or issue that they're concerned about. It's for other things that sort of like if you take the thread out of your sweater and that one little piece you thought you were going to pull out just unravels too much of the sweater and ruins it.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So let's go on to discuss Oswald. So we know, again, this could be an entire podcast just looking at Lee Harvey Oswald, a very, you know, fascinating and tragic figure. But let's just stick to his role in the assassination. Who was Lee Harvey Oswald with regards to the assassination? Was he a lone gunman? Was he part of a conspiracy? What did he mean when he said patsy? The Rob Reiner podcast on JFK that we discussed before we went on air, there's an implication in there if I remember correctly that he was some kind of Manchurian candidate.
Jefferson Morley: Well, that he was -- a guy from the CIA called me after he read "Our Man in Mexico" actually, and he said, Let me tell you who Oswald was based on your account. And this was not based on any information he had from CIA file. Just from being an operations officer. And I checked him out. He was who -- he had left the clandestine service but he was who he said he was. And he said, Oswald was an agent of influence. So he's not an agent who's out to obtain positive intelligence, a specific piece of information, who bought arms, who's the spy, who's having an affair, that kind of thing. He wasn't that kind of guy. But he was somebody who they could he said you could rely on to do something for you. And he said based on what he saw in "Our Man in Mexico", which is not a book about the Kennedy assassination or about a conspiracy, that that was his sense of who Oswald was and that's what I have come to believe very strongly, that Oswald was what he said he was. He said he was a patsy, meaning the fall guy for other peoples who actually committed the crime. Now like I said, I don't know who the other people were but I think that that is what happened on that day and that's why I give my description of what I think happened on that day. So, you know, the idea that Oswald was a leftist who, you know, killed Kennedy out of revolutionary fervor. Well, if that were true, why would he deny the crime? Wouldn't he say, you know, proclaim his tremendous success? I mean, I think that you prima facie, you have to take very seriously when somebody says, "I'm a patsy" and then they're killed the next day in police custody. Like, that would sort of tend to confirm what they were saying, no? So you can't just rule out that possibility. That's like, that's the main -- to me, the main and most likely possibility and then you have to situate and organize the other evidence around that. So that's what I would say about him on that day.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And what -- why did Oswald believe that he was a patsy? Was it just because I never done what they're telling me that I done, so it must -- there must be some other explanation?
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I think he knew more and I think that's why he was killed, because people didn't want him in court talking about what else he knew. And I, you know, he knew something. He wasn't an innocent party, you know? When he said he was a patsy, he had guilty knowledge. He knew something was going on. You know, he goes to work, the President's shot and killed. He goes home and gets a pistol. Well, he didn't need the pistol when Kennedy was alive. Why does he need the pistol when Kennedy's dead? Maybe because he fears for his life. Well, he should have been fearing for his life because he was killed less than 48 hours later. So he's acting like a guilty party who knows something. [ Music ]
Erin Dietrick: In the last interlude, I give you the facts of what we know to be absolutely true of the events of November 22, 1963. Now I'll do the same for Lee Harvey Oswald, a complicated figure at the center of this story. Oswald was born in 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was what some would call a troubled child. He attended 12 different schools growing up and spent some time in juvenile detention. He quit school at the age of 17 and joined the Marines, where he spent only around three years. During that time, he was court-martialed twice, once for possession of an illegal weapon and once for violent behavior. After his military service, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. He married a Russian woman and had one child, a daughter. They weren't loving life in Minsk, as he wrote, "Not enough nightclubs or bowling alleys". Fair. And they moved back to the United States in 1962, settling in the Dallas area. In March of 1963, Oswald used an alias to purchase a rifle and a revolver handgun by mail. In September of 1963, Oswald took a trip to Mexico City, where he attempted to gain passage to both Cuba and the Soviet Union, but was denied both. In October, Oswald was hired by the Texas School Book Depository, and his second daughter was born. He spent the weekends at home with his family in a Dallas suburb, and lived downtown in a boarding house during the week. On Thursday, November 21st, in an unusual request, Oswald asked his coworker for a ride back to the suburbs to pick up some curtain rods. The next day, Oswald was arrested by Texas police for the murder of President John F. Kennedy. He repeatedly denied responsibility for the assassination. Two days later, on November 24th, as he was being escorted to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot on live television by Jack Ruby, a local club owner. Just like the President, Oswald was taken to Parkland Hospital for treatment, but succumbed to his wounds around 1 p.m. [ Music ]
Mark Zaid: So, you know, no one has ever been able to ascribe a motive to him. The Warren Commission struggled with that, couldn't come up with it. There is no -- actually the only evidence that we really know of about his relationship to President Kennedy or view of was positive. Marina Oswald, his widow, testified she thought that Lee liked President Kennedy, or that she remembered positive comments that he had made. So we don't know, and that's obviously a huge gap in the case. Sometimes you just don't know motives. You know, it reminds me as I'm sitting here in the case sometimes you just don't know motives. You know, it reminds me as I'm sitting here the mass murderer in Las Vegas at the rock and roll concert, he killed, like, 60 people. What the hell is that about? And he killed himself, and there's no known public motive as to why would he do that, what would make you all the sudden go and do that. Oswald amazingly was only 24 years old. You look at him, he looks a lot older from that timeframe. He wasn't an idiot. I -- and I'm not disagreeing with Jeff about that he doesn't have the intellectual capability to do what some people think he did. But he wasn't the idiot that the Warren Commission sort of portrayed him to be. I would tell people just go on and google "Oswald" and "radio interview". And he did some radio interviews and he comes across as a -- as kind of a, you know, pretty articulate guy to talk about certain things. But he wasn't very well educated. I do not believe, especially after all the interactions I've had with intelligence officers, I don't think he had that capability of being an intelligence officer for the US government. He would be a horrible choice for the US government to rely on. Everything known about him in his lifetime, as a child, in the Marines, as an adult in New Orleans and Dallas, Texas, I wouldn't trust him at all. He was totally unpredictable. I wouldn't want to, you know, have him to be part of a conspiracy as an intelligence officer, wittingly or unwittingly.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, but if you're trying to make him a patsy, you know, the goal wasn't to hire him as an intelligence officer for the CIA. Oswald thought that he was spying on right-wing groups. And for a left-wing guy, he spent most of his time in 1963 especially, not with liberals or communists, but with anti-Castro Cubans and very conservative militant-type people. So, he was a bit of a schemer and he was insinuating himself into this world. So, you know, Oh, the CIA would never, you know, be interested in a guy like Oswald.
Mark Zaid: Well, Jim Angleton, the Chief of Counterintelligence, maintained a file on him constantly for four years. There's no trace in that file anywhere where anyone says, This guy's not worth paying attention to. Nobody said that in four years before Kennedy was killed. To the contrary, one of the things that we've obtained under the JFK Records Act is the routing slips on information about Oswald that came into the CIA in 1960, 1961, 1962. You look at these documents. Oswald went to the Soviet embassy and he asked for his passport back. That document goes to the State Department, they send it to the CIA, it goes to the CIA, we have the routing slip. Seven different offices signed for that. So Oswald was not somebody who wasn't of interest to the CIA. Multiple CIA officers signed for multiple documents about him. Everywhere Oswald went between 1959 and 1963. The CIA had his current address. In real time. I mean, he did so many things that came on the CIA's radar. I'm sure that they had a huge interest. They should have. In fact, the one thing that I'm -- and I'm sure you would agree with me on this, that there's no evidence of, and I don't understand how this cannot be, of any debriefing and not a spy debriefing. Interviewing Oswald when he came back from the Soviet Union by the US government.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I mean, t0here's no indication they did that.
Mark Zaid: How do you not do that as the US government?
Jefferson Morley: That's a perfect indication of how Oswald has this unusual status. And you can tell, if you're familiar with the document, yeah, he's gone to the Soviet Union, he's defected out of loyalty to communism. He's offered in defecting, he says, "I will share military secrets with you." And that's written right on the State Department documents. CIA understood that full well. He comes back and they don't interview him at all. Another guy named Robert Webster, also a military guy, defected in 1959, same time as Oswald, got -- lived in the Soviet Union, became disaffected, returned at the exact same time. When Webster came back, they took him up to his house in Massachusetts, they interviewed him for a week, and we now have this record.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Just -- there's a few things that I want to dig into. So one of them is Cuba, so I just want to return to this issue. So, where is Oswald on Cuba? So he's ostensibly communist, but then as you say, Jeff, he's hanging around with lots of hardcore anti-Castro people. So I'm also just -- I'm still a little bit confused about -- or maybe some of our listeners are a little bit confused about Kennedy and Cuba. They may know from listening to this podcast of you know the exploding cigars, the -- Bobby Kennedy's obsessed by Castro, they want him taken out at any cost, you know. So there's just, where is Kennedy on Cuba and where is Oswald on Cuba? Because I think that that's important to clear up.
Jefferson Morley: Well, so let's start with just the larger political picture. In January 1, 1959, Castro leads a national rebellion which overthrows a pro-American dictatorship. Castro makes nice with the United States, says he's not an enemy, but Cuba wants to be independent. And so for a year, Castro's being ambiguous. In that year, the United States decides that they can't live with this and they want to assassinate him. As Castro realizes what what's going on with the United States, he develops his alliance with the Soviet Union. He goes to get Big Brother so that he can keep the United States at bay. So Castro is popular in the United States. These young guys have overthrown a dictatorship. Castro abolishes racial segregation in Havana, something that was very clearly understood in the American South at a time when there was hardline resistance to segregation. So, Castro's seen as very threatening, and especially as he embraces the Soviet Union. So that's the end of the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy inherits that situation, comes in, and the CIA presents him with the plan, We can overthrow this guy. Our fingerprints, your fingerprints won't be on it. You know, just sign off. And Kennedy asks for a few adjustments and signs off on the Bay of Pigs. So Kennedy's in his first -- you know, he's going along with the CIA. He's fine with overthrowing Castro. But when the operation, the invasion goes south, he says, you know, I told you I wasn't going to do air support. And I'm not going to do air support. And so that was the end of the invasion. Castro crushes the invasion. Well, for the men who were killed and captured, you know, Kennedy had betrayed them, you know, in their hour of need. When they were under fire, he could have saved them and he didn't. So that breeds incredible hostility in South Florida. That's why the CIA investigated the anti-Castro Cubans and not Oswald, because if you lived in South Florida, those were the people who you knew who wanted Kennedy dead.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And just briefly, Jeff, where does this expectation of air support come from? If it's a CIA operation and plausible deniability and, you know, if the US Air Force gets involved, then it's a different step, it's a different type of operation. So have they been promised that and Kennedy agrees and then withdraws it? Or where does this rage come from?
Jefferson Morley: Kennedy asks, Will air support be necessary? And the planners say, No, you know, there'll be a national uprising, we'll overthrow him. They did have a backup plan, which was they had planes that they had -- US planes that they had disguised as Cuban planes. And so they had a bunch of planes ready to go that they could have said were defecting Cubans, not Americans. So they did have a cover story in place. But JFK, I mean, JFK just didn't want to go to war in Cuba. JFK was a student of history and he thought the axis of history ran through the European capitals, from Moscow to Berlin to Paris to London to Washington. That was where history was made in JFK's mind. Cuba, unimportant. And so he just didn't really care enough to commit his capital and commit US forces to save these guys. So that was the source of the bitterness. Now, in 1954, when the CIA staged a coup in Guatemala, the plan unfolded, ran into trouble, and Eisenhower did authorize covert air support. So there was this expectation within the CIA that Kennedy would do the same thing that Eisenhower did, and there was a lot of surprise when he didn't. So that's where -- that's the nexus of the Cuba issue. We can talk about Oswald in Cuba but maybe Mark can add a little bit more.
Mark Zaid: Well, and it was important when Oswald went to Mexico City he was trying to get a visa to go to Cuba and then possibly to go back to the Soviet Union, there's one particular theory. But, you know, just to kind of bring it back to the intel aspect of Oswald's connections, some of the things that's so interesting, here it is, he goes to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. He is surveilled by the CIA, not necessarily -- the embassies were under surveillance, that we had photographers across the -- I'll say across the street, I don't know where they were.
Jefferson Morley: They were across the street.
Mark Zaid: But, you know, monitoring the entrances to the Soviet and Cuban embassies and we had audio surveillance of some. And there were phone calls that were made into the embassy possibly of Oswald. There are theories that it wasn't Oswald, particularly because we don't know, because we don't have the audio tapes. We don't have the photographs. We know they existed. Why do we know they existed? Because of Win Scott. Win Scott, as the station chief of the CIA, wrote an autobiography. That's what led to Jeff's "Our Man in Mexico". That's why I was representing his son, to get this autobiography that James Angleton had frantically tried to find after Win Scott died in 1971, and ultimately the CIA got. And when the House Select Committee was given a copy of this classified autobiography, much of which has nothing to do with the CIA. Win Scott had been a star football player in the University of Alabama --
Jefferson Morley: Softball player.
Mark Zaid: Wasn't he football?
Jefferson Morley: No, he was a baseball player.
Mark Zaid: Baseball? Oh, I've been saying this wrong. Anyway, but he was a PhD in mathematics, super, super smart, photographic memory. Was OSS in World War II -- I'm sorry, was FBI, then OSS, then CIA. And still I'm sure to this day the second-longest serving station chief in CIA history.
Jefferson Morley: Yeah.
Mark Zaid: Because I can't imagine anybody has come close to his record. So he dies, the autobiography says that Win Scott had photographs of Oswald going into one or both the embassies in his safe. To this day, none of those photographs have ever surfaced. And the House Select Committee on Assassination, among other reasons, did not believe what the CIA was telling it because of Win Scott's manuscript. Because why would Win Scott have lied? He was a -- even though he wanted to do an autobiography, it was going to be in Reader's Digest by John Barron, who is someone who wrote a lot about the CIA. It wasn't going to be an expose of the CIA.
Jefferson Morley: No, no. He was a loyal --
Mark Zaid: He was a loyalist. He was frustrated with the bureaucracy of the CIA, but he was a loyalist at heart. So the fact that he wrote there were photographs and the CIA was saying, No, there's not, nobody ever, they didn't believe the CIA.
Jefferson Morley: Let me tell you a story, because this comes out of the latest records. So we're reading the records of the photographic surveillance team, which have now been declassified. And in there, they mistakenly declassified the name of one of the agents, the name of the of the man who rented the apartment where the photo surveillance base, looking at the gate of the Soviet embassy was located. With that name, we found the occupants of that apartment. The woman who -- it was a husband-and-wife team who were employed by this by the CIA who took the pictures and had done so for 10 years. That woman had died, but her son was alive. And we found him. He's a car dealer in Washington State, Andres Goyenechea. And I said, Would you talk about your mother's work for the CIA? And he said, I'd be glad to. And I said, Well, one key question is, Did the CIA ever take a picture? Now, this is the woman -- the son of the woman who was taking the pictures, and he himself was a CIA asset. He had a code name. He was going to university at the time. He would relieve his mother in the afternoon and he would take pictures of everybody. What did your mother say? He said, My mother said when she saw Oswald on TV, I took his picture coming and going a couple of times. So, the documents lead to testimony that shows -- reaffirms the finding of the House Select Committee that the CIA probably did have pictures. Now we have one more piece of evidence to that effect. You know, so, you know, so that story is not true. Why is the CIA withholding evidence in a -- in an assassination of a President? You know, we now have very strong evidence. Mark's, you know, summarized it. We have very strong evidence. Why would they do that unless they had something to hide? To me, it seems self-evident that they're hiding something incriminating around this.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Kennedy --
Jefferson Morley: So we've talked about the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, same kind of thing. The Soviets have installed missiles, the generals want to invade, CIA wants to invade, and Kennedy, fearing nuclear war, fearing a ground war in Cuba, makes a deal with Khrushchev and there's no invasion. But what happened was, and this is important to understand too, Kennedy got a huge boost in public opinion from the Cuban missile crisis. I think it's the largest single jump in presidential approval in history. He goes from, you know, 60% to 80% overnight because he preserved the peace. And Kennedy got this idea in 1963 that peace was good politics. You know, he's a pretty conventional Cold Warrior up until 1963. But after that, because of his experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think he thinks, No, I can end the Cold War, I can wind down these wars, and that will be popular. And that's the theme that he was really developing and exploring in 1963. And going in a different direction, much to the consternation of the Cuba hawks, who still wanted an invasion and the overthrow of Castro. [ Music ]
Erin Dietrick: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of "SpyCast". Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please also consider leaving us a five-star review. Next week on "SpyCast", we will continue with part two of this episode. If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at SpyCast at spymuseum.org or on X at intlSpyCast. If you go to our page, thecyberwire.com slash podcast slash SpyCast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm Erin Dietrick, and your host is Dr. Andrew Hammond. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughn III, Emily Coletta, Emily Rens, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tre Hester, and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]
