The JFK Assassination – a Debate with Jefferson Morley and Mark Zaid (Part 2)

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 a five-star review. Coming up next on SpyCast.

Jefferson Morley: The CIA and the US Government are at large, they are their own worst enemies. I mean, they've created the distrust and the disinformation by undertaking such actions such as that, without explanation or knowledge. [ Music ]

Erin Dietrich: This week's episode is part two of a friendly debate between guests Jefferson Morley and Mark Zaid, moderated by our very own, Dr. Andrew Hammond. If you haven't listened to part one yet, make sure you check out that episode first. This week, they continue their conversation about their lingering questions surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. This time, digging deeper into the Warren Commission, and details of Lee Harvey Oswald's very interesting back story. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are SpyCast. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Andrew Hammond: Okay, so we've got an understanding of Oswald and Cuba. And I think it would be interesting to discuss Vietnam, this is something that always comes up as well. So, this just piggyback on the point that you made, 63, he wants a change of direction, pieces good politics. One of the things that we often hear is that he was wanting to come out of Vietnam's, he was changing a stance, or he was wanting to wean the war down, and some of the other theories that have been offered as the Hawks, LBJ, they wanted to ramp it up. So, Kennedy was an obstacle, so he had to go. So, there's a lot going on there, but help our listeners understand, Vietnam, what's going on there? What do we know for sure? What was Kennedy going to do with Vietnam? Is it conjectural? Or do we have a smoking gun document saying we are going to end The Vietnam War? I know we don't, but just help the listeners understand the Vietnam issue with regards to the Kennedy assassination.

Jefferson Morley: So, Vietnam is a former French colony, there's a pro-American government in the south, there's a Communist government in the north. This is a country that's been unified for a thousand years. And they are engaged in a civil war in the 1950s, and the Communists are gaining strength in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam in 1950s, and 1960s. US takes the place of France. And the generals say, let's escalate in 1961. Kennedy's first meeting, the generals come in and say we need 8,000 combat troops in Vietnam. Kennedy says no. He gives them more advisers, but he doesn't give them combat troops. So, if you look at his deliberations in Vietnam, Kennedy is always resisting appeals from the Pentagon to escalate. He's relying more and more on the CIA. He agrees that-- he lets the CIA basically staged a coup in 1963, because the government is failing. He wants a change of direction there. But the point, I think, is that Kennedy is not. At every opportunity to escalate, he turns it down. And when Johnson comes into office, as soon as he gets a chance to escalate, he does. So, I think there's a real difference between Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam. Now, you know, was that a factor in the assassination? You know, Oswald is much more connected with the Cuba issue and, you know, the Vietnam is kind of in the background, but I think they are similar in that Kennedy is alienated from his national security apparatus. The leaders of the CIA and the Pentagon have a very different picture of what the problem and possibilities in Cuba and Vietnam are. The Johnson and Nixon administrations were far more hawkish on Vietnam than what we know historically of Kennedy. And you know, the historical record reflects that the Pentagon was at odds with Kennedy over what to do in Vietnam and the proxy of a war against the Soviet Union. The question for our conversation as well and, okay what does that mean? What does that mean with respect to November 22, 1963? Is that a reason to kill President Kennedy? You know we talk about motives, is that a motive? Okay, sure. That's a motive. You know, the mafia had a motive to kill President Kennedy. You know, there are-- Jackie Kennedy had a motive, too. That's a theory, right? That Jackie Kennedy actually killed him because he was sleeping around with everybody and including clients of mine-- Judith Exner, who was a client of mine, was sleeping with President Kennedy. And one of my Secret Service agent clients would watch to make sure Jackie wasn't coming back to the White House while JFK was swimming with fiddle and faddle, who were two secretaries at the White House and skinny-dipping in the White House pool that existed at the time. So, there are a lot of motives, and there are books about, saying Kennedy's policy on Vietnam lead to his assassination. But again, I'm looking at what's the evidence? Tell me who, what, why, and how. And there's going to be just conjecture about it. There's no hard evidence.

Andrew Hammond: So, let's discuss the question of motive. So, in the Warren Commission.12, the commission cannot make any definitive determination of Oswald's motives. So, what--

Mark Zaid: I mean to me this is a catastrophic weakness in a prominent homicide case. Somebody kills the President of the United States for no reason? That is not plausible. And so, to me, right there, the Warren commission explanation is not sufficient. Especially from a man, and Marina Oswald is not the only one who said, Oswald thought of Kennedy as kind of an ordinary politician, but he liked some things about him. That's what his friends would say about him. That would be a reason to? So, why would a person like that kill the president?

Andrew Hammond: So, let's go on to discuss motive. So, we've got Oswald, did he have a motive?

Jefferson Morley: I don't see any motive.

Andrew Hammond: The Warren Commission said that they couldn't find the [inaudible 00:06:46] of one, but then we've got the other players. And we don't have time to go into all of them. So, maybe we can just discuss some of the leading contenders as you see them. The CIA, which you've mentioned, Jeff, the mafia, LBJ, Castro, the KGB.

Jefferson Morley: I don't think that there's any evidence to support the KGB did it theory. Organized crime was involved in the assassination, Jack Ruby killed Oswald. Jack Ruby was connected with organized crime figures. So, we know there is an organized crime connection. The evidence connecting Castro to the assassination, there's far more evidence connecting the CIA to Oswald than there is connecting the Cubans to Oswald. No question. Far, far more. So, you know, I don't-- there were people who were very hostile to Kennedy's policies, and feared them, and wanted to end them, and were perfectly happy when Kennedy's presidency ended, and made no effort to investigate who was responsible. So, I think that tells you what was going on was people didn't care who killed Kennedy. It was fine that he was gone. They felt the country was in better hands and, you know, let's move on. A little man killed a big man, get over it. That became the CIA's story very early on. Just, we now know it's not true. He wasn't a little man. He was a guy who was of deep interest to the CIA.

Andrew Hammond: Where do you see motives, if any Mark?

Mark Zaid: You know, again, motives. I mean, I agree with Jeff, I do not think KGB Soviet Union killed President Kennedy. I mean, that would be Nuclear War and the end of the planet. But motive. This is where people go for conspiracy theories, they look at well, what would the motive be? I mean Castro had a motive. It's funny, there's a great story of when the House select committee, investigators, and staff went down to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro in the late 70s and he relished in showing them the photographic surveillance, photographs that he, of the Cuban intelligence had of the CIA photographic photographers who were surveilling the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.

Jefferson Morley: He handed out a picture of a guy taking a photograph through the Venetian blinds.

Mark Zaid: Right, so, you know, at that level it just, especially given what they had already encountered with the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, sure you can come up with a motive, same thing with the mafia, Bobby Kennedy and the US government is cracking down on the mafia, you know they were at odds. They were enemies, for sure. Would it be better for them not to be in existence any longer, meaning the Kennedys? Yeah. You know, did they then do it? Well, there you're getting, you know, down the rabbit hole. I agree completely. Jack Ruby had connections, low-level connections to the mob, for sure. He came out of Chicago, he ran strip clubs in Dallas, very much connected. In fact, he was an FBI informant a few times, at least in 1959, which the Warren Commission did not know, by the way. So, the FBI lied to them. They had that information. Now, does that make any difference in the grand scheme of things? There's nothing that then ties it. I mean there are some very respectable people who I admire very much, like Professor Blakey who believes it's the mafia. Or Dan Moldea, who is a good friend and former client of mine who they believe the mafia did it. I just don't. I don't personally see it.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. And let's discuss the issue of Lee Harvey Oswald was the, you know, the single gunman theory. So, in the research for this episode, doing some looking around online, you have one news story where ex-researchers have found that it would be impossible to fire these three bullets and for everything to happen the way that the Warren Commission said. And then you have another news story, two months later, on a different channel, and researchers have proved that it's actually plausible to do everything that the Warren commission said, and fire these three shots off in this period of time, and all. So, you know, I'm just putting myself in the position of the listener, of the average person on the street. Like where does the preponderance of evidence lie in terms of is it possible to do those three shots in that period of time? Let's discuss the dummy bullet and stuff separately but just the three bullets. Can you do that in that period of time?

Jefferson Morley: I mean they've tried multiple times to reproduce the shots according to what the Warren Commission said, and very, very few of them, even with expert marksman, and it's not clear Oswald was an expert marksman. They couldn't do it. You know, the other thing is, who do you believe? I mean look at the people who didn't believe the official story, okay? They're not crazy. Lyndon Johnson didn't believe, he said repeatedly in retirement, Oswald did not act alone. Jackie Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, they never believed the lone gunman theory. Charles de Gaulle, President of France, did not believe the lone gunman. Fidel Castro did not believe lone gunman. You can say oh, well, Fidel Castro, he's a communist, he's an evil guy and all that. Well, the CIA spent 40 years trying to kill him and they failed every time. The man died peacefully in his bed. You can't say he didn't know his way around CIA assassination conspiracies. So, these are all highly credible people. Now, do they have a stupid theory? No, let's not talk about people's stupid theories. Let's talk about what people in the know thought. Okay? Did the three shots go? Three members of the Warren Commission did not believe that Oswald fired those three shots, and that one of them missed and two of them hit the motorcade. Nobody in the car thought that that's what happened. John Connolly, who was hit by the bullet, didn't believe it. His wife, Nellie Connolly, sitting next to him, didn't believe it. Jackie Kennedy, sitting 18 inches from her husband said she didn't believe it. And Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service man in the front seat, he didn't believe it. So, it's just not a very credible theory. The eyewitness evidence, the photographic evidence, and the dispassionate view of informed people afterwards, very few of them believed it. So, it's not crazy to not believe that. There's plenty of very sane, much better-informed people than me who came to that conclusion.

Andrew Hammond: And what's the best evidence? Or the best story that fits the facts of what actually happened. Two shooters? Three shooters? All from one place? Let's put aside who did and the motives, but just the ballistics and the mechanics of it, like what's the best explanation that we have?

Jefferson Morley: So, I think given the fact that nobody in the limousine thought that the Warren Commissions' account was accurate. The three members of the Warren Commission, and the man who appointed the commission didn't believe it. As well as this other evidence makes us think that is not true. There's a documentary that came out last year called, "What the Doctors Saw," and it's about the testimony of the doctors who tried to save Kennedy's life. And these seven doctors had talked a little bit at different times, but not. And in this film, they get together, and they talk. And these doctors say it was their conclusion that Kennedy had been hit by gunfire both from the front and the back. That he was hit by crossfire. So, these are seven medical professionals, again, not conspiracy theorists, they don't have a crazy, stupid theory. Dr. McClellan was a highly respected doctor, and he said there was no doubt in his mind that Kennedy was killed by a shot from the front of the limousine. That's pretty strong evidence to me. I mean, why shouldn't I believe the doctor who treated him and saw his wounds from 18 inches away. I think that-- I think he is a credible witness.

Andrew Hammond: And just briefly for our audience, if LBJ and members of the Warren Commission didn't believe the Warren Commission report, like why did they? Like how did the findings come about then?

Jefferson Morley: Because, you know, it was a national tragedy. There was no solution. People wanted to get on with it. There was no obvious-- it was very, you know, people didn't know anything about the surveillance of Oswald. They didn't know anything about the testimony of the doctors after this. People wanted to get rid of it, you know? It was a painful, horrible thing. And it was like, let's move on and just, you know, make the best of it. And so, you know, John Sherman Cooper told his aide, you know, I don't believe it. They won't see, you know, they're closing their eyes to the evidence. But if push came to shove, you know, Earl Warren said this has got to be unanimous, and he told Richard Russell, you can't put in a descent. And so, they went along. That's why people went along, because it seemed like the thing to do.

Mark Zaid: I fully agree that many very respectable people don't believe the conclusions, but that by itself is not evidence. I mean there were members of the Warren Commission who had their doubts. And it was the Warren commission members who barely showed up for any of the investigative hearings. And we don't know the degree to which the evidence was examined by so many, by any of these individuals, and there are, you know, you put a microscope to anything, look at the O.J. Simpson case, you know? Does anyone-- who really thinks O.J Simpson didn't kill his ex-wife and Ron Goldman? But he was acquitted and because the lawyers did a really good job of putting things under a microscope, that everything has flaws when you look at it. And the doctors who were at Parkland, their views are absolutely important, that is evidence, they are credible witnesses. But they are only a piece of the puzzle to then examine with ballistics, and forensics, and to look at just all the evidence altogether. I mean, you've got to look at it, everything. And where I will stay open minded is, just give me evidence to the contrary, right? We can give you all these bits of evidence, right? Oswald supposedly brings curtain rods to the Texas School book depository building, but his apartment and where, the places he lived all had their curtain rods. Right? The rifle gets traced back to him. I mean, you start to have to go through all these machinations of conspiracy theories to say frame, frame, frame, frame, frame. I mean, so many people would have to have been involved. That doesn't mean you can't have doubts, reasonable doubts, legitimate doubts. I mean, I think Jeff is a very intelligent person and like I said, he's a friend. But we have our doubts, we have a different view on the interpretation of some of this evidence.

Andrew Hammond: Let's just discuss, briefly, Jack Ruby. So, I mean, what's going on there? You have the main suspect for the, probably the crime of the century, and then he gets shot on live TV. I mean I can understand why people are like WTF? Like what is going on there? That doesn't make sense.

Jefferson Morley: The main suspect, who's denying responsibility and saying he's a patsy, and is killed within 24 hours in police custody. And that day, the day Oswald dies, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover get together on the phone, and they say we have to convince the public that Oswald acted alone and he has no confederates at large. Okay? The President hasn't been buried yet, okay? Oswald has been dead for a couple of hours. The JFK assassination investigation is less than 48 hours old. And the two top officials in the US government have sent a very clear signal, one man alone did this. That's the finding we want. And that's the finding that the FBI delivered three weeks later. And that's the finding the Warren Commission delivered nine months later. And the Warren Commission didn't know the half of it, you know? They didn't know about the surveillance of Oswald. And so, this story was settled on right from the start and all the, you know, and we've learned since then, it came with a whole bodyguard of lies that hid highly relevant information. So, to me, like that tells you, you know, and Mark says, you know, look at all the evidence-- and the totality of evidence, it strikes me as highly unlikely that one guy killed the President for no reason, denied it. Another guy came along and killed him, for no reason, and that's the end of the story. And no end. Here's an important thing, nobody in the US government loses their job. Nobody at the Secret Service loses their job. They don't fire the director. They don't fire the men who failed to respond to the gunfire. Nobody at the CIA has been following this guy for four years, nobody gets fired. Nobody knows about it, so nobody-- So, Secret Service, FBI and CIA. Nobody loses their job. So, the President gets show dead in broad daylight, an atrocious security failure, and the stance of the US government is everybody did their job just fine. Nobody needs to be sanctioned or disciplined in any way. To me, that says the fix is in, and they wanted nobody to talk about this. And because if you fire somebody, then they've got a motive to talk. So, nobody loses their job, and nobody talks.

Andrew Hammond: So, the night that Ruby dies, what-- why did J-- sorry, Oswald dies. Why did J. Edgar Hoover and LBJ say, you know, here's the findings that we have to get. Like is it from a listen, this is a tragedy, the country needs to move on.

Jefferson Morley: Well, they clearly didn't want a full investigation, right? Right. The investigation hasn't begun, and they are already delivering the conclusion. So, one thing you can say very clearly is they didn't want a thorough investigation. And not surprisingly, the Warren Commission investigation wasn't very thorough. They didn't know about the surveillance of Oswald, and they didn't know about the assassination plots against Castro. So, the Warren Commission is flying blind, thanks to the CIA. You know, and to say this has nothing to do, you know, we can still reach the same conclusions, just doesn't seem very plausible to me.

Mark Zaid: But see, the flip side of that is, then of looking at well, what would Occam's razor tell us? It is known Lee Harvey Oswald was in the Soviet Union. It was publicly reported when he defected to the Soviet Union. That's in the aftermath of the assassination. Even though 1963 is not 2024, with respect to cellphone and Internet and things like that. Stories started going really quickly. I mean reporters had interviewed Oswald in the Soviet Union, so they can look in their files and over the course of Friday, Saturday, into Sunday morning's news there was a lot of information coming out about Oswald, and there was a grave concern that maybe the Soviet Union was involved. Maybe Cuba was involved. And so, if you put it in that context, while I don't agree with Hoover and Johnson pushing it. It doesn't necessarily mean that the fix was in for an investigation, not a thorough investigation. It was, we need to make sure there's not going to be World War III. That is a serious concern. Now, which of us are right about that? I mean that's why we're still debating this and discussing it now because we have no idea which one of us is right about it. But what I'm saying is there is a plausible explanation for a lot of the cover-up of which there was a lot of cover up.

Jefferson Morley: And Johnson says this to Earl Warren when he's trying to get him to take the job.

Mark Zaid: Yeah, because he didn't want it.

Jefferson Morley: Earl Warren doesn't want the job. And Johnson says, and we have the tape, you know, you have to do this because if these rumors get out of control, rumors of a conspiracy, then we're going to have a World War, and 40 million people will die. And by the end of the conversation, Earl Warren is in tears, and he agrees to take the job. So, that was the rationale was we, you know, we can't look into this because we have to keep the peace. You know, but that meant that there was no serious investigation. I mean I think, you know, the Warren Commission didn't know or didn't have these key facts.

Andrew Hammond: And let's discuss a little bit more LBJ, and Hoover. What was Kennedy's relationship like with both of them? I mean we know that him and LBJ never, you know, cut from different cloths. Different parts of the country, different upbringing and stuff. But was the animus like, was there real animus there? Like what--

Mark Zaid: Kennedy and Hoover were not buddies at all. Hoover was not a fan of RFK Jr., who of course, was his boss as the Attorney General of the United States.

Andrew Hammond: When you say not friends, put it on a spectrum, like did they hate each other? Loathe each other? Or was it?

Mark Zaid: I wouldn't say that-- fearful, cautious fear.

Andrew Hammond: Fearful respect for one another?

Mark Zaid: I mean you had to have respect for one another. First of all, Hoover knew in particular, and Jeff, you can tell me if you know more about this. Kennedy had had and I don't know if it was an affair, but he had dated a woman who was likely a German spy, a Nazi spy. And Hoover knew about that. And I mean, now we know more about this.

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, and it was a very dangerous secret because it was in the summer of '63, that the British Prime Minister lost his job dating a Russian woman.

Mark Zaid: But this was in the forties.

Jefferson Morley: Right, no, no.

Mark Zaid: But nobody knew about it.

Jefferson Morley: But this idea that a leader was dating a Communist. You know, that's why Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy were very worried about this story, about this woman, Ellen Rometsch. Because it had this contemporary resonance of this sex scandal that happened in the UK in the summer of 1963. So, Hoover had this real lever on them. By, you know, it was an open secret--

Mark Zaid: Yeah, no.

Jefferson Morley: -- that JFK was having numerous affairs-- I mean I told you about my Secret Service clients witnessing it, but Mary Meyer, who died in Georgetown, socialite, was supposed to be having an affair with President Kennedy. Obviously, Marilyn Munro was possibly--

Mark Zaid: No, and Mary Meyer shows up 15 times in the White House visitor logs again. And every time Jackie is away. So, there was no doubt that she was a serious girlfriend of the President.

Jefferson Morley: And Hoover, I mean Hoover was amassing this type of information on lots of people. And he knew about Martin Luther King having affairs. He tried to get Martin Luther King to kill himself by trying to leak that information. So, there was always discussion, I think in every administration post-World War II, about getting rid of Hoover. I mean, you know, relieving him as FBI director and everyone--

Mark Zaid: Backed away from him.

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, realized that was not a smart thing to do. And if anyone wants to read a great book, "Chancellor Manuscript." by Robert Ludlum in the early 70s, post-Hoover's death. It's a fictional, historical fiction about Hoover's secret files, which he supposedly had which after his death, vanished. And have never been seen.

Mark Zaid: And then LBJ, I mean, so there's real animus between the Kennedys and Hoover, and real tension. Johnson is a little bit different, he's definitely not in the inner circle, he feels scorned, and looked down upon. But you know, and then people say oh well, you know, so he was involved in a plot to kill Kennedy. I mean, I think Johnson understood right away what had happened, and that's why he didn't want a real investigation, and made sure he didn't get one. But you know, I don't see any evidence linking Johnson to the assassination.

Andrew Hammond: And let's discuss, also, since we are, you know, at the spy museum, let's discuss Allen Dulles and John McCone. So, the outgoing CIA director and the incoming CIA director. What were their relationships like with Kennedy and what role, if any, did they play in the assassination and the aftermath?

Jefferson Morley: Well Dulles is on the Warren Commission which, you know, Kennedy had fired him. It's a-- I mean, I don't think that could happen today on a presidential commission, it wouldn't be considered credible. And so, the commissions, in that way, is what is compromised from the start. Dulles is clearly going to protect the CIA's equities, and he did.

Mark Zaid: And he did.

Jefferson Morley: And so he prevents an investigation. John McCone was better friends with Bobby Kennedy. They were both very Catholic. McCone's wife had died, and Bobby and Ethel kind of helped him through that time. So, they were close. But McCone was an outsider, he was a Republican businessman, he'd been the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Kennedy put him in there as kind of, to deflect some of the republican and right-wing attacks. He could say, look I've got one of your guys in there. So, that meant that McCone didn't know that much about what was going on within the agency. But, on the afternoon of the assassination, McCone is the first-person Bobby Kennedy calls. And McCone comes from CIA headquarters to Bobby's house on Hickory Hill, and they go out for a walk on the grass. And the first questions Bobby asks him is, did your guys do this? That was Bobby Kennedy's prime suspect, the CIA. So, let's get this started. You know, Oliver Stone didn't invent the idea that there were high-level machinations against the Kennedys. That was the first words out of Bobby Kennedy's mouth after he heard his brother had been killed. And they went to the director of the CIA. And Bobby told Arthur Schlesinger that McCone had assured him and given him very credible assurances that they were not involved. So, that's the story of McCone and Dulles, as I understand it.

Andrew Hammond: And just very briefly before we go onto Mark. Was Kennedy's Catholicism in any was part of any of this? You know, he's the first Catholic, The Pope, all this. You know all this Kennedy or is that like completely irrelevant to this?

Jefferson Morley: I think so. I mean Jack Kennedy was not a religious man. He didn't go to church except, you know, coerced. So, I don't think-- and certainly compared to Bobby Kennedy. I mean, Bobby Kennedy did go to church, Bobby Kennedy was an observant Catholic, JFK was not. So, I don't think it's a fact.

Mark Zaid: I think if I recall, there is at least one book that says that The Pope killed President Kennedy. [ Laughing ]

Andrew Hammond: I remember reading this book a long time ago, but by Vincent Bugliosi, on the Kennedy assassination, but he came up with 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people have been accused at one time or another of killing Kennedy.

Mark Zaid: We had a joke, and there's a lot of variations sort of like that. You know, we've identified 121 of the 3 assassins.

Jefferson Morley: There's a great onion headline, you know, 43 assassins, 12 suspects, and all that. You know, I mean but if you think about it the idea that there is a lot of stupid JFK conspiracy theories, that doesn't prove that the president wasn't killed by a conspiracy. That's a logical fallacy. And to refute stupid conspiracy theories, to me, is a way of avoiding the disturbing fact pattern. So, that's why I don't like to talk about conspiracy theories at all. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know anything about conspiracy law, I'm not trying to put anybody on trial for conspiracy, not trying to take away anybody's liberty, you know, I'm not filing criminal charges, I don't have subpoena power. So, the whole conspiracy discourse both as, you know, woo-woo-woo, you know, and also conspiracy as conspiracy law, a very specific thing. I tried to not frame the discussion around those concepts because I don't know them and I don't think they're useful.

Andrew Hammond: And the Warren Commission, we've spoken about it tangentially, but can you just tell the listeners what was Warren Commission? How many people were on it? How were they selected? Et cetera?

Jefferson Morley: So, the Warren commission consisted of seven people, was appointed by President Johnson. Johnson, after the assassination, these investigations were popping up all over. The local authorities in Dallas were talking about bringing a conspiracy case. Congressional committees were trying about launching their own investigations. Johnson wanted to get it all under control. So, the Washington- the editors of "The Washington Post" that week, right after the assassination floated the idea of a high level commission. And Johnson comes around to it in conversation and then starts and goes and asks people to be on it. Earl Warren, Richard Russell, Senator from Georgia was his mentor. So he wanted him on it. John Sherman Cooper was a Republican Senator from Kentucky, but he was personally friendly with the Kennedys, so he was somebody who he wanted on it. He wanted Dulles on it to protect the CIA, Hale Boggs, was a leader of the Democrats, Southern Democrats, so Johnson could count on him in that way. So, you know, these were leading figures of the establishment who were picked to control the investigation.

Andrew Hammond: And future President Gerald Ford?

Jefferson Morley: And Gerald Ford is minority leader in Congress, so you have a leading Democrat, and a leading Republican from Congress, two senators, somebody from the CIA. So, you know, it was a handpicked group. And Johnson had signaled that he wanted to find Oswald, a lone gunman. He had signaled that. And the members of the Warren Commission understood that that's what the president wanted.

Andrew Hammond: And as much as you'd have looked at this, are there any comparisons with the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission?

Jefferson Morley: I think the 9/11 commission compares very favorably with the Warren Commission. I think the 9/11 Commission's findings are very defensible, there's aspects of that story that we don't know everything about. But I think, you know, they identified, you know, what happened. People say, oh, Jeff, you're interested in JFK, is 9/11 a conspiracy? And I say, yeah. It was a conspiracy, it was a conspiracy organized by this guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was bankrolled by this other guy Osama bin Laden and, you know, that's what happened. Yeah, it was a conspiracy, it was a jihadis conspiracy to attack America. And the 9/11 Commission showed that. And yes, there's doubts about the 9/11 Commission, but there's a lot more doubts about the Warren Commission than the 9/11 commission. So, I think that the 9/11 Commission definitely did a better job.

Andrew Hammond: And is there anything else about this issue with regards to the intelligence community you think is important for our listeners to understand? Does this go beyond the CIA? Are we talking about, I think the Defense Intelligence Agency, or maybe not long created then the National Security Agency, other parts of the military intelligence and so forth? Or are really talking about the CIA when we talk about intelligence on the Kennedy assassination?

Jefferson Morley: I mean, I'll go back to what I said at the beginning. The President was killed by enemies in his government and those probably included intelligence personnel. Which agency they were from? I mean, we don't know who they were, so I don't think we can address with that kind of specificity. I would say there is no evidence that DIA was involved. There is plenty of evidence the CIA knew lots about Oswald. So, you know, is there other things that need to be known? I would connect the Kennedy assassination to the larger trend in US policy in this different direction that was taken after. And that that's significant that Kennedy was going one direction, and the country in its foreign policy, especially in overseas interventions against nationalist movements was very different after Kennedy was dead.

Andrew Hammond: So, it almost seems like you're saying, Jeff, that Kennedy defused the Cuban Missile Crisis and delivered a peaceful resolution to it, but the price that he paid was his own life.

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I think that Kennedy's moves in '63 mobilized his enemies against him.

Mark Zaid: So, the NSA was created only a decade earlier from the assassination. The DIA had just been created literally. You don't generally hear too much about either of those agencies connected to the Kennedy assassination, other than the NSA of Martin and Mitchell who were two NSA analysts who defected to the Soviet Union during the Kennedy administration. The only other organization you generally hear about is The Office of Naval Intelligence because Oswald was a Marine and the U2 flights that were being flown in part out of Atsugi, Japan where Oswald was based for a little bit of time. And then, of course, you hear the FBI, and the FBI is involved with lots of intelligence operations here in the United States against the Soviet Union and Communism, etc. J. Edgar Hoover, obviously big, anti-communist. But it's really just the CIA that you generally hear about in this context. You know, you mentioned Vince Bugliosi's book. It's definitely one that I would recommend. I knew Vince, he was a friend. It's very, regardless of what one thinks about it from a conspiratorial standpoint, it's one of the more researched and detailed. I mean the book, itself, is like 900-fricken-pages. And then there's--

Andrew Hammond: 1,200, 1200 to 1500.

Mark Zaid: Then there's a CD-ROM that comes with it that has like 900 pages of footnotes. I mean I remember first talk to him and his research staff in the early '90s, he spent like 30 years, literally working on this book almost. So, it is a great wealth of resource for even the most conspiratorial people to read, because you want to read who has the most information and assess it for yourself. I mean, there are conspiracy books like, "Six Seconds in Dallas," I absolutely would, even though it's an early book. I absolutely recommend. Because Tink Thompson did a good amount of research. He was worthy.

Jefferson Morley: Well, he was the first person to really analyze the Zapruder film carefully, from a forensic point of view. He did a much more cheerful job than the Warren Commission and that's why it was one of the early, eye-opening books, because he had done something.

Mark Zaid: But we do need to have Jeff talk about, I always mispronounce Joannides.

Jefferson Morley: George Joannides, yeah.

Mark Zaid: Because this is from an Intel standpoint. And this is, this is where one of the unanswered questions and things that came to light as a result, in particular of The Records Collection Act. I'll tee it up, I mean here it is. Here is this person was assigned by the CIA to liaise with the House Select Committee on assassinations and unbeknownst to anyone on the House Select Committee, including Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the committee, we learn years later, and this is where Jeff's research takes off on it, that Joannides was one of the guys monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald and connections to it.

Jefferson Morley: Yeah, so this was a story that emerged are at the very end of the of the review board. I remember I got the facts in The Washington Post newsroom in November 1998. The review board no longer existed. And a friend of mine on the board said, Jeff, there's some documents coming out and you should look at them. And he said, you know, you can get them. So, I got them from the archives, and it identified this man, George Joannides as the case officer for the Cuban Student Directorate and the members of the group had been in touch with Oswald before the assassination. And so this-- his name was revealed in these about 10 pages of documents for the first time. Those documents also said that he had been the liaison to the House Select Committee in 1978. So, I knew Blakey a little bit and I called him up and I said Bob, did you know this guy? And he said yeah, Joannides. He was in the Office of Legal Counsel, and he was the point man when we wanted to do interviews or get documents, we would go to him and he would make you make it possible. And I said well, did you know what he was doing in 1963. And he said, no we had an agreement with the agency that we didn't want anybody who had been operational back at that time to be involved in our investigation. And I said, well Bob, look at this paper. You know, he was all-- he was running the Cubans were all over Oswald. And when Blakey's investigators, Gaeton Fonzi and Dan Hardway asked Joannides, well who was running the DRE in 1963. They were looking at the answer to their question and he said I'll get back to you. So, it was a brazen-- I mean, Blakey says it was a felony, it was an obstruction of his investigation an obstruction of Congress is a felony. So, it was a brazen, you know, deception of the second JFK investigation, the House Select Committee investigation. You know pretty-- again, this is why the CIA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore, you know, in of, trust us. If you do something like that, you know, you're not cooperating with the investigation of a murder of a President, it's that simple. And there's nothing theoretical about this story. And there's a whole file on Joannides that's never been released. So, you know, that's a lead. That's a-- to me, that's a live lead in this story.

Mark Zaid: Yeah, no. I mean this is a perfect example where Jeff and I absolutely, fundamentally agree. And, you know, the CIA has-- and the US government at large, as so often is the case in these types of situations, are their own worst enemies. I mean they've created the distrust, and the disinformation by undertaking such actions such as that, without explanation or knowledge. This was found out years later. And that is unacceptable. And in it throws into doubt anything that they do or say. And, you know, I mean I like I said, I routinely deal with the FBI, the CIA all the time, represent its people all the time. I you know, have lots of friends at senior levels, you know, and I may trust individuals, I don't trust the institutions. And I've had them lie to me countless times, I mean that's the nature of their job and their business. And I see constantly cases where I know they are withholding information. I know they're lying about certain things. And it makes it difficult to formulate a rational, logical position, knowing things like that. You know? And we can look, this case historically is very much about-- there's so many different angles, as we're talking about today. And it's separating that intel angle of okay, did the CIA play a role in the assassination? One angle. Versus what did the CIA do to contribute to the questions that exist today? Much, much larger story and I think a much better-- more legitimate, absolutely credible concerns that people have that the CIA misled, distorted, lied, withheld information from the various investigations throughout the course of history, including the review board during the 1990s.

Andrew Hammond: On that note, I want to thank both of you gentlemen for a really interesting through the horizon of the Kennedy assassination and the intelligence community. I know we've barely scratched the surface.

Jefferson Morely: No.

Andrew Hammond: It was a surface that needed scratched.

Jefferson Morely: No, no. We have covered a lot and I think this is a very good conversation because, you know, we're laying out, you know, what happened, what's the debate? What's the meaning in this evidence? And how do we understand it? That's still a live question, people might answers. You know, people come up to me all the time and sometimes the questions are ridiculous, you know, did Jackie kill, you know. But other times it's like this enduring curiosity. I just was, you know, dealing with a guy on a totally different subject and he said, what do you do? I say I write books about the CIA. Next thing you know, he's like dives right into this conversation. Guy is like basically a stranger to me, and he was like well-informed, curious, tell me this, tell me that, so it's like it's a thing out there, it's still a live issue.

Andrew Hammond: Well, hopefully this podcast will give people the tools to approach this issue and ask intelligent questions and so forth. But thanks ever so much for your time, I really appreciate that.

Mark Zaid: Absolutely.

Jefferson Morley: Thank you.

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 enjoyed the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please consider also leaving us a five-star review. Coming up next week on SpyCast.

Speaker 1: They couldn't really figure out what was wrong with Markov. Until someone was looking at an x-ray and saw a little fleck on the x-ray. And saw that there was a very small pallet, smaller than a fingernail that had been lodged in his leg and that this contained ricin.

Erin Dietrick: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org or on X at I-N-T-L SpyCast. If you go to our page thecyberwire.com/ podcasts/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 Samual, Elliot Peltzman, Tre Hester, and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's pre-eminent collection of intelligence and espionage related articles, International Spy Museum. [ Music ]