| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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| If you were watching that hearing yesterday, taking a look at the newly released documents concerning the JFK assassination, you may have noticed Jefferson Morley as part of the panel. | ||
| He is the author of the JFK Fact Substack newsletter. | ||
| Joining us now in Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Tell us a little bit about your history in looking into this. | ||
| Why are you so fascinated by it? | ||
| I came to the JFK story actually through reporting on the CIA, not through the literature of JFK's assassination. | ||
| When I first came to Washington in the 80s, when I first appeared on C-SPAN, I was covering the civil wars in Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. | ||
| And to understand those conflicts and the U.S. role in it, you had to understand the role of the CIA, which is difficult, especially for a guy like me, a young reporter. | ||
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unidentified
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I didn't have sources, didn't have a security clearance, never worked at the CIA. | |
| So I had to educate myself by just talking to a lot of people, reading a lot, reading a lot of original documentation, understanding how the CIA worked, and what was the history of the CIA in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
|
unidentified
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That inevitably leads back to the conflict between the United States and Cuba. | |
| And if you go into the deep history of that, that takes you into the conflicts of the early 1960s, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy. | ||
| So as I got interested in the CIA and interested in the Kennedy assassination later, that was always the lens in which I viewed it. | ||
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unidentified
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And so I wrote three books about the CIA, about top men in the CIA. | |
| The first one was Our Man in Mexico, and that's the story of Winston Scott. | ||
|
unidentified
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He was the head of the CIA station in Mexico City from 1956 to 1969. | |
| Very powerful man in the Mexican scheme of things. | ||
| And he was there in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald visits the embassies. | ||
| And so Wynn Scott figures centrally in the JFK assassination story. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so what I wanted to do in that book was rather than give my theory of the assassination, because like Jeff, who cares about your theory? | |
| You know, nobody in the world should care about your theory. | ||
| But what Wynn Scott thought about the assassination, a CIA insider who had a front row seat and whose role in the whole thing was pretty shadowy for the next 20, 30 years. | ||
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unidentified
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That was an interesting story. | |
| And then my next book was The Ghost, which was a book about James Angleton. | ||
| He too was involved in the JFK story. | ||
| He controlled the Oswald file. | ||
| Again, I was doing a biography of Angleton from his beginning of his career to the end of his career at CIA and looked at what did the Kennedy assassination look like him. | ||
| And same with my third book, Scorpion's Dance, Richard Helms and Richard Nixon, was the story in that book, the director of the CIA and the president. | ||
| That was really about Watergate, but the JFK story is kind of in the background between these two Machiavellian men. | ||
| So my three books kind of give you a view of Kennedy's assassination in the eyes of the CIA. | ||
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unidentified
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And that's how I came to it. | |
| That's how I came to the story. | ||
| And that's how I understand it as a national security event of deep interest to senior CIA officials. | ||
| You wrote about the recent release of information that if you look at it and search for fact patterns, you find things related to the CIA things you've talked about. | ||
| What did you mean by that? | ||
| Well, you know, it's a familiar experience for me when the government puts out tens of thousands of pages of documents and I get a call like 30 minutes later saying, Jeff, is there a smoking gun? | ||
| And I'm like, well, I'm reading my third of 2,300 documents, so I'm not quite ready to pronounce judgment. | ||
|
unidentified
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But people want that. | |
| They want to know what's new, what's new. | ||
| We got to step back a little bit. | ||
| If you want to understand what's coming and what we just learned last month, which is very important, let me say that. | ||
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unidentified
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People who say there's nothing in these files, it's simply not true. | |
| They don't know where to look, is what I would say to people like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we can talk about some of the specific things that emerge. | |
| But it's more important to step back and look at what have we learned in the last five years, right? | ||
| Because JFK information has been coming into the record slowly. | ||
| And so it's not just what happened last week. | ||
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unidentified
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It's all the accumulation of evidence over the last five or ten years. | |
| What does that tell us? | ||
| What it tells us is the official story that one guy shot the president for no reason and another guy came along and shot that guy because he felt like it. | ||
|
unidentified
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We now know that's not what happened. | |
| I mean, the evidence does not support that. | ||
| It doesn't support the notion that one man fired at the limousine three shots from behind. | ||
|
unidentified
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The doctors didn't think that. | |
| The people in the limousine didn't think that. | ||
| The police officers on the scene didn't think that. | ||
| The photographic evidence doesn't show that. | ||
| So the official story is not true. | ||
| So what did happen, that's a much more complicated thing. |