John Newman exposes a alleged Russian mole, Bruce Sully, within the CIA who facilitated Lee Harvey Oswald's defection and orchestrated JFK's assassination to block Vietnam troop withdrawals. Newman details how General Taylor and Robert McNamara suppressed Kennedy's 1963 withdrawal plans (Operation Plan 34 Alpha) while feeding false intelligence on Viet Cong strength. He further alleges Soviet infiltration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s inner circle via Stanley Levison and claims media corruption by government plants, arguing that these conspiracies aimed to derail Kennedy's détente and civil rights agenda before his death. [Automatically generated summary]
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My View on November 22nd00:03:09
When I originally called Jim DiEugenio, I asked him, Is there anyone that you can think of that has more information on this than anyone else?
If there was one person you can pinpoint that is the encyclopedia on what happened on November 22nd, 1963, who would that be?
He said, You are the person, probably the only person, that has been through the millions and millions of documents, classified and unclassified.
I wanted to start this thing off by bluntly asking you, after.
The years that you've spent researching this to date, what is your opinion on what happened on November 22nd in 1963?
Who was involved?
Why was the president assassinated?
And why is it still being covered up?
That's going to be the subject of my last volume on the JFK series, but I won't give you the same answer I give everybody else when they ask me that.
Go ahead and solve it and save me some time.
I'm actually going to go to Duquesne University this fall in November, and I'm going to actually talk about.
My current view on what happened on 11 22 63.
So it's a coup, it's a coup d'etat.
And the thing that people get messed up with is there's a tendency to hate the CIA and to think that that organization is acted alone or did almost everything.
It's not like that.
First of all, you have to understand how the hierarchies are put together.
And we're talking about.
Political should be at the apex of a democracy, and the military is right there at the top with them.
In a Cold War, which is what was happening in the Kennedy administration, it was right in the middle of the Cold War, who does the fighting?
The fighting is not done by the political military hierarchies because they're not shooting bombs and bullets at each other.
The spy services are the ones who do that.
So a coup d'etat within a superpower is not done.
By the spy service.
The spy services can help do coups in other countries, but in the United States and in Great Britain and in France and in the Soviet Union, a coup within a country is the military overturning the political hierarchy.
That is what happened in 1963.
Now, the CIA has a role to play, but it is not institutional.
We have to understand that by that time we had a new director of central intelligence who really had no idea about a lot of things that were happening, things that were not withheld from him, McCone.
So what you're talking about is a series of people that were in on the Kennedy problem way back when Kennedy was first became the president of the United States.
The Dissertation That Changed Everything00:07:12
And so I'll do my best to try and take us through how that started and how that finished.
When did you first become interested in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
How long ago was this?
When did you start researching all this?
When I was at, I was still in school.
I was doing my PhD and I had been promoted from the NCO Corps as an officer.
And I ended up going up pretty fast and ended up working at the top of the NSA as the military assistant to the director, General William Oldham.
And I had decided that I wanted to do my dissertation on Chinese affairs, Mao Zedong, and things that I knew a lot about.
One day when we were flying down to the Carolinas, I always carried his pictures and all of his slides and everything.
He put his newspaper down, his New York Times, and he said, John, what's your dissertation going to be?
And I told him what it was going to be about China.
And he said, Oh, come on, you can do better than that.
Show some metal.
You know, just overturn an orthodoxy like we're like, which is actually what is expected of a dissertation, but nine times out of ten, that doesn't happen.
Anyway, so I was taken aback by that.
And I said to General Lodham, what if I told you that President Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam at the time he was murdered?
And he thought for a while.
And he said, you know what, John?
If you could actually make a good case for that, that would be a terrific dissertation topic.
Then he put his paper back and went back to reading his New York Times.
So we got home, back to Fort Meade that night, and I called my mentor, Dr. Richard Thornton at George Washington, and I told him I was going to change my topic.
And he said, to what?
I said, JFK in Vietnam.
And he said, I thought he should never ask.
That's when that started.
It took me years, many years, to, I took the maximum amount of time allowed for study, which is five years.
And then eventually I submitted my thesis.
It was approved by a board at George Washington.
And eventually I defended it with honors.
But at the same time, I got involved with Oliver Stone's movie.
He found out what my thesis was, and it was something he what year was this?
Well, we're talking about 1980, 1991.
It was 92 when the film came out, but he got a hold of me a couple of years before that due to a meeting between somebody I don't want to go into all the details, but his chief of research found out in a bar in Dallas, Texas, what I was doing my dissertation on, and said, Oh my gosh, you know, Oliver Stone, that's what he wants to put in his movie.
So I got a call from Oliver Stone, and we got hooked up doing that.
But the point is here to not waste time that what happens is my dissertation comes out at the time of the movie.
And very quickly, what had happened.
Within weeks before that actually happened, my book was suppressed or attempted to be suppressed.
There were actually two episodes of this oppression suppression.
First of all, I have to say that by law and the statutes that govern pre-publication review, as an Army officer, my stuff has to be reviewed by the Army.
Not by NSA or anybody else.
And I did.
I sent it in and it passed with flying colors, no problems.
I gave a copy to the CIA and, you know, to the NSA, excuse me.
I gave a copy to NSA and they said, okay, fine, we'll keep it.
But they acknowledged that it was okay because the Army had okayed it.
And that was the way it was from about 1989 to the time the movie came out.
And then all of a sudden, as the days approached for The movie to come out, I was told that I got a call from the general counsel's office at the NSA and they said, You can't publish your book.
It's classified.
And so I said, Well, what's classified about it?
I'd be happy to look at that for you.
And the answer was, I don't know.
And I said, when will you know?
And the answer was, we don't know that either.
So anyway, there I was stuck with less than a year to go to get my pension and a lifetime of medical care for my family, facing possibly losing my clearances and being thrown out of the Corps and losing everything.
And so it was a tough time with my parents and my wife.
But eventually I decided to stand my ground.
Because I thought that, you know, look, there's a lot of good people in the military.
Not everybody's bad.
And so I felt like this was part of my duty to stand up and tell the truth.
And so I stood my ground.
Anyway, it all turned out okay in this instance because there was a big press corps briefing that was going to take place the day after the movie came out.
And I was going to be there interviewed by the press from all over the world.
And NSA called me out of bed that morning, early that morning, about 5 a.m. my time, 7 a.m. their time back in Washington.
And is this Major Newman?
And I said, yeah, who's this?
And they said, this is the National Security Agency.
Your book is good to go.
Have a great day.
Click.
And so I did.
But it wasn't over.
Early on in the next year, 93, towards the end, my book disappeared.
And I couldn't get, my calls were not answered at Warner Books.
In the end, it turned out that they had illegally actually decided to suppress my book instead of doing it legally, which would be to option my book and take it off the market for, you know, a year or two or whatever and pay me something.
And then I would get it back.
But anyway, they had another book they were helping bring out, actually two or three, but one in particular was going to be arguing the opposite of my thesis to try and take away all the effect that this was going to have, that the effect of my book and the film had.
And so I, The Galbraith family got involved because Jamie Galbraith, one of John Kenneth Galbraith's three sons, was at the University of Texas.
He was in political science, and his students actually wanted to use my book.
By that time, they couldn't find it, and they told him.
Pulling Out of Vietnam00:03:59
He said, What's going on?
They said it's been suppressed.
He called me up and asked me if I didn't mind the family looking into it.
They did.
They got a hold of Hale Boggs Jr.
He was the Time Warner Inc. CEO at the time.
He was also in Congress.
People will know that name.
He looked into it and he called back and said, It's a scandal.
And he called the head of Warner Brooks and said, You need to fix this, you know.
And so I did.
They finally called me.
It was the president of Warner.
He said, Are you going to sue?
How do you want to handle this?
And after some thinking, I said, Give me my rights back.
And that's the end of it.
I didn't want to spend a lot of time in litigation.
So that's how I got it back.
But by that time, it had been remaindered.
So I lost out on a lot of money.
But the book sold.
And 25 years later, I wrote the sequel to it in 2017, which you have here on the table.
That's how things got started.
Now, I didn't go into the assassination.
But what I did say, and what was very obvious, was.
That after Kennedy died, we went into Vietnam.
And he didn't want to do that.
He fought hard about it.
Sometimes he lied about it a little bit.
He didn't want people to know he was pulling out because he wanted to let them know that after he was reelected.
But things came along that changed all that.
And we can talk about that if you want to go back to the story from the time Kennedy was elected until he was assassinated.
But my dissertation convinced me.
And eventually it was no longer a hypothesis.
We got tapes, White House tapes, and things like that, that showed that it wasn't a thesis, it was true.
Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam.
And there was nothing you could do to stop that.
And eventually, of course, nowadays, new books that come out agree that Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam.
So, but that's one of the reasons that they didn't like him.
A lot of the power people in powerful places didn't like him.
Right, right.
So that's interesting.
So when you, when Oliver Stone called you up and wanted you to work on the movie, what, in what capacity did you help him with that first movie?
Did you, you advised on some of the facts that were involved or?
Well, he flew me out to California, and I said, I have some restrictions.
He said, well, what are they?
Were you still NSA?
I was still an Army officer, yeah.
So I told him that, number one, you will not use my Army rank or anything like that to hype the movie.
And he thought about that, and he said, okay, all right, I get that.
And I said, the other thing is I will not talk to you about anything except the Vietnam.
Part.
This was a movie, JFK wasn't just about Vietnam, but that was an important part of it.
And so I said, I will not talk about anything else.
He said, Well, why not?
I said, Because I work for 10,000 Pound Gorillas and I know what happens when you start talking about stuff that you are not an expert in.
And I'm never going to say anything to you that I don't know is true.
And after he thought about that, he said, Okay.
And we signed.
And I was one of the senior, in fact, I was a very senior advisor and one of the only ones that got to participate in that press junket, as I mentioned a few minutes ago.
So that's what I did.
And he called me back again for the movie he did on Nixon and other things too.
So I didn't just work on that film, but he liked my work.
And so I worked with Oliver periodically on other projects.
So your newest book is Uncovering Pop Hobbs Mole.
Can you explain to me the evolution of how you first dove into this with JMK in Vietnam and how you got to where you are now with Pop Hobbs Mole?
I decided after doing a book on religion.
Coming Back to the Case00:03:48
To get away from this whole Kennedy thing back in about 2003 or so.
And I spent six years working on a book called Quest for the Kingdom The Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Light of Yogic Mysticism.
Then I came back to the Kennedy case based upon my wife and somebody who came, a producer from Pennsylvania, and she stayed with us for a couple of days.
And my wife had not liked the fact that I spent so much time working on things, and all of a sudden, They wanted me to come back to the case, and I said, Okay, look, here's the deal.
I'm not going to come back and write a book.
I'm either coming back or I'm not coming back.
And coming back means doing the whole thing, whatever it takes, however long it takes.
You know, are you okay with that?
Yes, we are.
So I did.
So the first thing was this one here, Where Angels Tread Lightly.
Hold it up next to you.
Okay, this is this book here.
It goes all the way back into the 40s and stuff and has appendices to tell people how to.
my readers how to deal with pseudonyms and cryptonyms and a lot of my I broke in this book.
And later on, I wrote this one here, Countdown to Darkness.
This really was my coming to grips with General Lemitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Many chapters in there on all of that and its role.
Eventually, I came into the storm.
I spent three whole chapters dealing with a guy.
My name is Sam Halpern, who was a CIA guy who was lying about Robert Kennedy being behind all these things.
And I became a very close friend with his son, Bobby Jr.
And Bobby Jr. endorsed this thing with a very, very nice blurb, as we call them.
But this was a book that took me all the way into 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Berlin Crisis, and things like that.
But what happened was, as I came towards the end of the book, I noticed things that I didn't understand.
And the next thing that was coming up was a book I called Armageddon.
I've been working on it for a long time.
I've done many big shows on radio programs and on Zooms and at James Madison University, where I work.
I've done presentations there.
But what happened was, I never had a conclusion to the Into the Storm, as I do in all my other books.
I didn't do it because I knew I didn't have a conclusion.
So I just pulled down the curtain and I said, intermission.
This is an intermission.
So this book, Into the Storm, ended as an intermission.
And we were working hard.
I have my own inner sanctum of four or five people that are very good and very solid and just want to be part of this whole program.
And so.
We ended up looking at things and trying to figure out these.
I don't want to go into details, but there were three or four things that didn't make sense.
And so when we looked at those in particular, it ended up that it looked like we all made, and I'd made a huge mistake going all the way back to Countdown to Darkness and even before, about something called the mole hunt.
Identifying the Mole After 70 Years00:03:44
Okay, when Oswald defected way back in 1959.
There was a mole hunt afterwards.
And we all thought, I did and everybody did, and I wrote about it, that the mole hunt was designed by the counterintelligence chief of the CIA named James Angleton.
That was the guy in charge.
I thought I had done interviews with people in the security office that told me things that I didn't understand.
And they were screaming at me at this time when we were deciding what to do with Armageddon.
And so it turned out that it looked like we were about to uncover Popov's mole.
Now, Popov's mole, we'll talk about Popov himself.
He was a Soviet intelligence guy, which is their GRU, Soviet military intelligence, had defected and told the CIA.
Defected to the CIA.
Yeah, so what he had been, but eventually, towards the end, not the beginning, he defected in 52, early 52, and it wasn't until, excuse me, yeah, that's right.
So it wasn't until much later, like in 1958, April, that he told George Kiesfalter, his case officer, that there was a high echelon mole in the CIA that had access to the technical details of the U 2 program, the secret U 2 program that flies up at 52,000 feet.
And so that mole had never been discovered.
Pop-offs mole had never been discovered 70 years out.
And so we started looking at it.
And all my guys that work with me and gals, I got to mention Heather Fear, she was a great asset too.
Alan Dale, Jay Harvey, there was a number of people that they were actually telling me, you need to stop boring and begotten for a minute.
And you need to take a time out and you need a separate book.
For this, I resisted for a while, but then I realized they were right.
And so that's how Papa's Mole came about.
I identified who the mole was after 70 years.
We had never been caught, never been found.
How certain are you that you're correct about who the mole was?
Okay.
At the end of the book in Papa's Mole is a chapter called, hold it up here, this is the book.
At the end of the book, there's a whole chapter.
Called Providence, Authenticity, and Multiple Attestation.
And I took every piece of an evidentiary hierarchy that I used for a hypothesis that the mole was Bruce Sully and vetted it in terms of that methodology.
And so every piece of that evidentiary hierarchy has not one, not two, but usually three, four, or five independent sources.
And so at the end of the day, And the thing that was most powerful that came late, I did not know until four or five months to go.
I'd already gone to Ancestry and done a workup on Sully.
But I hadn't really noticed until that point in time that his travel records were going to have to be really important because a high echelon mole, a high echelon mole has to travel.
Powerful Pieces of Evidence00:02:01
They can't talk face to face.
In in the open.
They have to take talk face to face in a secret place and if they do anything else, like try and send a message or see, encryption is broken both ways.
The CIA and the and the FBI could read each other's stuff periodically here or there, and the same thing with secret writing can be intercepted.
The only way that a that somebody who's at the top of a spy service, who's gone to the other side, is they got to travel and either he's got to travel over there to to Moscow or Moscow's got to send people to him.
And I found the travel records, and they were astounding, because a high-echelon mole in the CIA is not even going to be activated unless the top person in the KGB decides to do it, because you might lose your eyes and ears at the top of the enemy service.
And so it was a big decision to use him, and he was used at a very important time.
It was a crisis.
A war had brewed, had started in the Middle East with both French and British troops in the Suez Canal.
And that was when Eisenhower decided to send the U-2s over the Soviet Union, not just Eastern Europe.
Anyway, that's how those travel – because we're going to talk about that as another subject.
But to finish your question, that was the icing on the cake.
When I put his boots on the ground in the middle of these operations, and he personally had to travel over to the Soviet Union, Not to the Soviet Union, excuse me, but close to it in Eastern Europe, where Popov had been stationed in Berlin and in Vienna to dig up dirt on him because Khrushchev wanted the technical details of the U2.
We'll get to that.
Anyway, I'll stop there.
Changes Everything About Angleton00:06:08
Those were, I had five or six or seven very powerful pieces of evidence from different, from independent sources that gave me this answer.
And so there's no doubt in, there was no doubt in my mind.
I called it a hypothesis.
But so I like to leave it to other people.
You can read the book and you can decide, but you're going to have to look at the evidence.
And some people don't want to read the book because they know that it's going to be convincing and they missed it.
And a lot of people who love reading my books for years, sometimes as you go along, they don't like me so much because I admitted I was wrong about Angleton and they don't want to be wrong about Angleton.
That good investigative work, whether it's crime or astrophysics or chemistry, goes through all these mistakes that have to be made till you finally get a solution.
And you just have to, it's a part of what you do is to say, this was wrong.
And it's not a cause for being concerned.
You can break out of some scotch and say, it's time to celebrate.
We're that much closer to where we want to be.
Well, A lot of people that are on this case don't like it.
You know, they've got their Colonel Mustard with a Wrench in the library thing, and that's it.
They're done, and they don't want to hear.
So, progressively over the years, I've lost people that like what I was doing, but it's what I do.
And so, but I'm absolutely certain that Popoff's mole was, in fact, Sully.
But in the whole.
All the trouble we went to to write that book, we knew that there was a lot more.
There were so many leads.
We were in a place nobody's ever been before, by the way.
It changes everything.
That the top of the CIA, actually, the CIA, MI6, the British version of their CIA, and also the French intelligence services was just a riddle to.
Riddle of Soviet spies.
That all the Western spy services were owned by Moscow Center.
It changes everything.
You've got to go back and look at all the stuff I was writing before, and I'm looking, I'm still looking at things.
But what we're finding is there were more moles.
And the fact that you have Sully by the short and curly's, that means we can now find out somebody else, like the guy Sully's boss.
We can get to him later.
So, anyway, that was a big deal.
This book was a big deal.
And let me just say one thing I didn't do the digital version yet.
Usually, I do a digital version, but I waited on purpose because I'm going to do a revision of the book with the digital version later in the year.
Didn't you tell me that something happened with Amazon publishing to Kindle?
They gave you some problems?
Yes.
Well, it was another.
This is the second time in my life that they tried to suppress my book.
Now, the first one was successful for two years.
This one here, within 24 hours of the publication of this book, I had a crashed computer.
The Dell people were on it, and I had to go back to factory records instantly, lost a lot of data and things.
But.
It wasn't fatal.
And at the same time that happened, there was on social media, all my stuff, all the things I was posting and everybody else was posting about it was taken down.
And we were told, and no one's out, but they told me they didn't like, they thought, they accused me of misinformation or something?
No, they said that you're using surreptitious means to get all these likes, all these people liking you.
I usually had, you know, a couple hundred likes about the stuff I was writing.
And it was stupid to say something like that.
But anyway, I didn't pay any attention to that.
The third thing was in the same 24-hour period that Kindle, Amazon got a hold of me and said, we're not publishing your book.
And they said what the reason was.
It was because the travel records of Bruce Sully that were Appendix I were illegible.
And that's not true.
Many of them, most of them are very illegible.
And you can look at them.
You can look at them.
I took them out of the book and put something in there that said, this is what happened.
And in fact, we started putting them all over the internet, you know, at the Mary Farrell Foundation and other things.
And we even threatened to start making up posters or bookmarks and stuff with pictures of soldiers.
So it didn't take long.
Within a week, my book was published.
Did you include all the flight logs and travel details in the book?
I did it first, but I removed them from the appendix.
But then I put something in there that explained why it's gone because.
Because Kindle, Amazon says they're illegible.
And then we start, it was much more, how can I say, embarrassing for them, for me to take it out because they said so.
So I didn't scream and yell.
I just said, okay, they took this stuff out because it's illegible.
And I hear some pictures that you can look at and you can decide.
And it was very embarrassing.
Who within these agencies in the U.S. currently, how many people and who are they, the ones that are involved in, Suppressing this thing that happened 70 years ago?
Certainly, nowhere near as educated in the ways of espionage, counter espionage, as the old CIA folks were.
Okay, they're dead and gone, most of them.
Why Flight Logs Were Removed00:02:52
There's one or two still alive.
They ended up liking me pretty much over the years because they wanted to know what happened, too.
Most of them didn't know everything because inside the CIA and the KGB, you need to know.
Not everybody knows what's going on.
Very comfortable.
And I was figuring stuff out and giving presentations.
And so, I had an incident where they pickpocketed me once at one of the things down in Dallas, and my phone was gone for a while.
We were able to trace where it was using a service back in Washington, or close to Washington where I was, actually in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
And we could tell that my phone was like up five or six floors upstairs.
And anyway, and they secreted it back into my carry bag when there was a lot of people rushing out of a door.
And then I went into another.
So they put it back in.
They couldn't break it.
I couldn't get into it.
It was an Apple phone.
So at the end of that presentation, a guy walks up to me in a nice jacket, no tie.
He's waiting in line.
He's first there, and people are still coming up in line to ask me questions.
And he says, John, you're okay.
You're fine.
You're going to be fine.
We just want to know what you know.
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Misdirections and Assassins00:13:00
Back to the show.
And I didn't know what that meant first, you know, but after we thought about the whole craziness of.
My phone disappearing and then reappearing at the end of that conference.
That's all it was a message that they wanted to see and they wanted to know.
It was a very important one.
It was on a guy by the name of Essiana that one of these misdirections I was knocking down.
But anyway, so your question was I was basically asking, like, who in the CIA or any of these agencies are.
So this new suppression of the book are people that are now coming out of the CIA in their 60s.
Yeah.
And they're all over social media.
And in fact, it's even on the internet.
One of them was a woman who actually outed all the rest of them saying, this is terrible.
We shouldn't be doing this.
But they're all over the place in social media and they have influence.
Well, they also have the investment from the QIntel investment company that invests in a lot of these big companies, which is mind boggling that they can have that much control over some of these companies when they're able to invest in all these big tech communities.
Exactly.
Exactly.
There's something even scarier because I started thinking.
What I ended up doing was going to a security program that international finance banks use and all the international multinational corporations use because their stuff has to be secure.
And you can get a program just as an individual.
But I started thinking about what if they infiltrate security companies too?
There's no end to this.
So, anyway, you have to know that they can watch.
And so I always assume.
That's happening.
And so, my relationship with the people that work with me, we're careful how we handle everything.
And so, because it's two ways, when you're being surveilled and you're smart enough, counter surveillance teaches you a lot of specific things that I know about.
And so, I'm not afraid to continue what I'm doing.
In fact, there's a lot.
Look, I'm going to say something because we're going to get probably to.
To the Kennedy assassination and the military's involvement in lots of things, that and other things.
And the same thing with the CIA.
I know lots of good people in the CIA.
I know lots of good people who wear the uniform.
And I'm very careful when I give these Zoom presentations at the end to show pictures of some of the generals who were fantastic and they would never lie.
And because of that, like under Westmoreland, General McChristian had to be sent home.
He was the head of intelligence.
And every time he got, he sent anything back to Washington, he said the Viet Cong is getting worse and their determination.
He sent that back with every single one.
And of course, what was going on at that time in that part of Vietnam was the 600,000 troops had been cut in half and things like that.
So when I tell a version of what I think has happened here or there and it involves bad things, lies, or things especially that are defrauding the American people to get them to go into a war.
I'm going to stand up and talk about it, but it doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of good people in government.
Right.
These are specific bad people.
You're not saying the institutions themselves are corrupt.
It's the bad apples that are inside there that make things go awry.
There's a photograph of me testifying in front of a committee, and it took the Pentagon by surprise for a long time.
And then we talked about it.
Then my punishment was please let them know the next time I'm going to be in uniform.
But what happened was when I came out, These officers, I know they said that they were so proud of you, John, for what you've done for the Army because we did do bad things.
The Army intelligence surveilled all the students, and they're not supposed to be doing domestic operations anyway.
There were a lot of things that gave us a black eye.
And so, when armed people, and that's one of the reasons that I stood my ground with.
JFK in Vietnam because we all have to do that sooner or later.
You got to make up your mind whether or not you're going to just be a weasel and bow to power or whether you're going to stand up to it.
Right.
Let me ask you this.
If you're in the shoes of the CIA or the American government, do you think it's a good thing for the United States for some of this information to come out?
Like if you were to expose everything that happened to JFK and all the corruption and everything about This high echelon mole.
Do you think that helps or hurts the U.S., that the truth comes out?
Well, it can only help because without, you see, our republic is founded on the idea that you have to have, the people have to have information in order to decide who our leaders should be.
And if you don't know what they're doing or what they're up to, the whole concept of our democracy fails right there.
So you have to, we have to deal with it at least very soon.
The problem is, you know, every four years it could be a new president.
And are we saying that we can't find out when the next election comes up, like what they did?
Is that what you want?
Right, but that's different than something that happened 70 years ago.
Yeah.
I'm wondering, like, what the implications would be if this came out, if the truth came out.
I think the truth is out.
I think that it's been there all along.
And a lot of what has happened are misdirections.
You know what a misdirection is, where you're confusing somebody, leading them the wrong way?
And so a lot of the investigations.
Were compromised, even though they were much better than the Senate Select Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, did real investigations, unlike the Warren Commission, which laid down for this to go ahead and do the public thing because they told Earl Warren, poor Earl Warren, that 40 million Americans were going to die if we didn't do the Oswald did it alone thing.
Later on, there are serious ones, but they get infiltrated before it starts to try and control the narrative.
So it's a constant battle.
With this stuff.
And it's not just what we're talking about.
The same thing happens with big corporations and stealing each other's stuff.
It's not something we're talking about here, spy services and Cold War and that kind of stuff, but there's just as much spying and all this stuff is done for reasons for money, too.
And in most cases, both houses of Congress are compromised because the money goes to both the Republicans and the Democrats.
They can't live without it.
Corporations and politics are, there's a very blurry line between them.
That's right.
So, in terms of the Cold War, who do you think, what spy agency do you think won the Cold War?
Well, the KGB won for a long time, but in the end, you know, they fell.
Right.
But it doesn't mean that some of the people that were doing that stuff, like Putin, whose job was deception, are still doing the same sorts of things, but There's no KGB.
There's a different, it was the FSB and now it's SVR.
And these acronyms we don't need to talk about today.
But here's the thing I want to say about the battles of the spy services.
And again, remember that that happens when there's not a war going on.
Once we got involved in Vietnam, things were heating up.
That was a real war.
But fortunately, it didn't get out of hand to the point of blowing the planet up.
Look.
Sully defected to the KGB.
Popov defected to the CIA.
And I can tell you right now that there were, I'm not going to say hundreds, but many, many people in our side of the street defected to the Russians.
And the same thing happened in Russia because it was even harder to live there.
So the point is that, in this world that we grew up in, and these superpowers, people working in the spy services of those superpowers, many of them didn't like what they were doing, and so you they end up people are being defecting in both right, both directions.
So what does that mean?
What does that tell us?
Well, it tells us that it's not a, it's not black and white, you know, and so you have the same problem in all these powerful countries which are not democracies, and and our democracy is being compromised as we sit here today, there are people who want to tear up our constitution right now.
So, anyway, so it's not us against them.
We find out it's us against us in the end.
And so we have to be careful not to say that everything we did was great and fine and Danny.
Not to mention your name.
Dandy, I meant to say.
Yes.
But look, I'll give you one example.
A lot of people still don't know about Operation Gladio.
Now, Operation Gladio was put into play at the end of World War II.
There was a fear that Stalin was going to just go march all the way across Europe and take everything all the way to the Atlantic.
He wasn't stupid enough to do that.
There was no way they were going to be able to hold that kind of territory.
But that was the war scare of 1948.
And so what they did was they buried caches of weapons and communication equipment all over Europe.
And so that once the Warsaw Pact armies had gone by, they would have these people come out of nowhere and behind enemy lines.
They were mostly.
They were assassins and provocateurs and people that were expert in blowing stuff up, which is what you would do if you were working behind enemy lines.
Well, that never happened.
And so all that stuff got used another different way.
The CIA and MI6 were the most at fault here.
But what they did was to use that equipment to.
Sabotage, blow up buildings, assassinate people, and tell the public that it was done by socialists and communists.
When it wasn't, it was done by the Gladio units that were being run out of two, we had two particular committees in NATO that almost no one knew about.
You had to be, the head of NATO was always an American general, by the way, for a long, long time.
So, anyway, for 40 years, this went on.
Murders and stuff blowing up.
And eventually it came out.
A guy by the name of Frankovich went over there and filmed everybody, including all the CIA people that were involved too.
And many of them, senior ones, came on camera to tell us what happened.
He had three reels of stuff, about six hours worth of stuff that was all filmed.
It was in different languages, but there were, you know, there was.
Almost illegible, writing what they were saying in in English at there and, and my, my good friend, Heather Fear, transcribed that whole, all of it.
Took her weeks to do it, so I have actually a Microsoft word version of every one of the, the interviews of all the people that were involved in all the, all those countries, and there's several books on Gladio uh, that have been written.
That are good books and I use those.
Some of these things I use them in in uh, at James Manzan where I teach.
The Hunt for Technical Details00:04:22
I teach counterterrorism there, and uh, sometimes I tell them, you know what?
What if I told you that the term counterterrorism might not even have counter in it?
And that's when you're controlled.
You think you're countering terrorism, but you're not.
You're just falling for it.
In the context of this whole thing, what role did Bruce Sully play in this whole story?
And how important was he in regards to what was going on with Lee Harvey Oswald?
He.
He was the one who put the plan together for the Oswald affection and all that, and that the hunt would be looking for the mole somewhere else, not him.
So he is the one who knows that there's going to have to be a mole hunt, and he can design it.
He's got about a year and a half to go.
Once he finds out, just before Popoff tells us, so that goes to Sully.
So Sully knows now that the West knows.
Right.
So there's going to have to be more, and Oswald doesn't arrive until the end of '59.
So it gives Sully enough time to jigger things around so that all the stuff comes to his desk, all the other government documents and everything, so he has control, full control of everything.
But that's just the first part of it.
He has to.
So here, I think it's time to talk about when Sully is actually activated.
Yes, yes.
Okay, because he, let me say, A lead that cropped up in the book shows that James McCord of Watergate fame ends up being involved as well as them all.
They were in World War II together.
And this is not something that I finished.
His story is littered through three or four chapters in there.
And recently, in the past several weeks, I've been getting ready for the new digital version.
And this is a big deal.
It'll be a chapter or two all on its own, the McCord story.
McCord was actually Sully's boss.
So, to understand where they are, let's just go over this again.
This is the Office of Security.
It is a high echelon thing all into itself.
There are six staffs.
I won't name them all.
The most important one is the Security Research Staff, Research.
And within the Research Staff, there are several branches, but there's one called the Research Branch, Research.
And that is where, at that desk, all information on moles, On false defectors, on false defectors, and the personnel files of everybody in the CIA.
All there at that one desk.
The perfect place to have it.
That is where Sully is.
That's where he is.
And it turns out that McCord is the deputy chief of SRS, of that staff.
So he's the boss of Sully.
They're sitting at a desk close to each other, and they're keeping their mouths shut because Sully, especially, if he says one word the wrong way, He could be outed, you know, for what he was doing.
So he was sitting there as a sleeper the whole time.
These two guys, McCord and Sully, were flyers in World War II over Germany.
They were bombers or bombardiers.
And so were the Russian guys there, too.
And, you know, you get banged up and holes in your airplane, you got to land somewhere.
So there was a lot of interaction between Russian and American pilots.
In fact, we gave them most of their planes.
Some of them came across the Pacific and so on.
There's a lot of interesting. stories about all of that.
But so Bruce Sully was the guy who knew, because the security office was also providing security for the U 2 program, knew the technical details of the plane.
The actual pamphlet, and not a pamphlet, it's a pretty thick little item that has the history of the U 2.
Bruce Sully Knew the Truth00:15:17
And it has a security part of it too, and it's not classified anymore.
It's there.
The Office of Security provided security for the U2.
So he knew the technical details.
Now we have to go to the Cold War.
And the Cold War, when the Cold War becomes a hot war, which was in 1956, there had been over the previous year a sort of explosion or implosion going on there.
There was suddenly a lot of the countries there, there was a lot of pro Soviet influence that cropped up real fast.
And so there were a lot of concerns about this in the Western powers.
They made the decision to do something about it.
They wanted to make sure Egypt would be in the right camp and that the Suez Canal would be in Western hands.
And so they invaded.
At that time, Eisenhower was our president.
Now, he's got a spy service, and Khrushchev is in charge over there on the other side in Moscow.
He's got a spy service.
Eisenhower had continued the decommissioning of American forces at the end of World War II.
World War II.
We had a huge army, the biggest thing on the earth at the time, and it was just way too big to be used for anything.
So he continued to decommission and try and put emphasis on the economy.
And his reasoning was that he could do the same thing with nuclear weapons.
They were cheap.
Outfitting divisions and armies and training them is hundreds and thousands of times more expensive than that.
So that's what he had done and was doing.
And so he, it was at this time that the CIA had come up with the U-2.
And at first, in June of 1956, he allowed that plane to go over East Germany and Poland, but that's it.
Well, by the time we get to July, things are heating up.
He makes a decision to let the U-2 fly over Soviet territory.
Because what is he looking for?
He wants to know.
He's probing Khrushchev to see whether or not they're going to send troops in.
Now, people that we sent in on the ground forever got caught and executed instantly.
So the only thing that he could do was to use the U 2.
It's a spy plane.
So it could look for troop movements and things on rails and that kind of stuff to see if there was any indication that the Russian forces were going to actually themselves intervene against the British and French armies in there.
What was so special about the U 2?
52,000 feet was above what Soviet radars could even see at.
Okay.
So the PP 2 or whatever, I forget the nomenclature, PP something or other, was something that Oswald would have known about.
He was the guy using with a grease pencil.
There were three places.
In Great Britain, they had one.
In Inzerlik, Turkey, they had another U 2 base.
And then at Atsugi, Japan.
The one in Japan was important because the U 2s could fly over.
The impact areas of the Soviet ICBM program, which Khrushchev had boasted about, said they had tons of them.
And the fact of the matter is, they weren't hitting their targets.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And the real truth was that Khrushchev decided not to, that particular verge of that particular missile, to produce it because it was so bad.
He was going for second generation.
So he was lying about all the stuff he had.
And that truth came out literally when Kennedy got elected president.
So, a lot of things he said, boasting that he was going to do to get Castro, he had promises he had to keep.
That's another whole story.
But going back to 1956, this is when Khrushchev finds out that these U 2s are flying over his territory and there's nothing he can do about it.
Now, Khrushchev, it took him four years to win the leadership struggle after Stalin died.
And he's on very shaky ground.
There are people in the wings waiting for him to stumble just once and get rid of him and take his job.
So, when he finds out about the U 2s and they can't shoot him down, and he knows that they have a high echelon Mulliver that they haven't activated, who knows the specs of the U 2s, he says, I want to shoot them down.
So, he tells some of his senior KGB guys, You guys get on your hobby horse and you're going to Washington.
And you're going to bring me back the details of that.
Oh, by the way.
So, he said, Go activate this guy.
Yes.
You got to go meet him.
It's either that or he comes here, but he also wanted.
How do you activate this guy?
Well, somebody has to tell him.
There has to be another mole somewhere.
That's got to be so difficult.
But that mole has had access to the Soviet Union.
Now, who would that be?
There's only one guy in the security office, and no Americans were allowed to go into East Europe and Soviet denied territory.
But I have McCord's travel records in that very month.
He was cleared by the security office for travel through.
WE, Western Europe, through EE, Eastern Europe, and for travel in Soviet denied territory.
McFord, Sully's boss.
Yeah, yeah.
He's been over there for years.
That's what part of his job was to go over there all the time and go to visit our stations in Berlin and Vienna and so on and so forth.
And so he was able to have contact because what do you think happens in Berlin?
People go across the borders and spies talk to spies and all this kind of stuff.
And same thing in Vienna.
So that's how Sully was able to.
To have contact with probably the GRU, which is where they found out about it.
This is the Soviet military intelligence, some GRU units over there.
But it has to be somebody because they knew Sully had this material in 56, not just when, before Popov, who told his case officer in 1958.
Back in 56, that was the whole raison d'etre for this trip.
I want you to imagine.
That you are one of these high echelon KGB guys in Moscow.
And you were told you and two of your buddies are going to go to Washington, D.C., the United States of America, incognito, and you're going to meet this guy who's been sleeping the whole time, and you're going to ask him questions.
You're going to be face to face with this guy.
You've got to go over there and do that.
You happy about that?
Hell no.
You're married, you know, and you never know what's going to happen.
I mean, you could get assassinated, you can be PNG'd.
But persona non grata.
You could be thrown out of the country.
And they're in a little bit of trouble because they're using false names.
Komarov was what the top guy used.
His name was Vladislav Kovchuk.
There's a couple of very, very good, and I mean capable KGB guys.
Conrad Sheff is the number one guy.
Bagley on our side was the number one Conrad Heffner's guy.
Anyway, this other one, Khrushchev used.
So, you're the first person to ever find out these minute details about these officers flying from Moscow to Washington when they did it.
Bagley under he, how do you find this stuff?
Bagley wrote about it.
Bagley wrote about the trip.
He doesn't know quite as much as I know about it because I've got Sully's travel records.
He didn't have that.
He didn't know Sully.
He didn't know who the mole was.
Okay.
But what he knew was that cough shock and two other people went over to find the mole, whoever the mole was.
Got it.
This book here uncovered that mole.
That's why it's called Uncovering Papa's Mole.
Okay, but it's a dangerous thing that's going on here, and so the problem is how are they going to talk to them all?
How are they going to find Sully?
How are they somebody has to tell Sully, right?
But you know, if they just go back there and start looking for safe houses, they're going to look like three Russians looking for safe houses.
You know, the KGB, the Buck Hoover's Bucket Brigade, will be all over those guys, right?
So, you got to have somebody you can rely on, an American.
Who's going to go search for places to meet?
Now, that's what Edward Ellis Smith had been doing in Moscow.
He was the first real CIA plant in the embassy in Moscow.
He had been an economist guy, but the State Department had rules against any KGB guys being in the embassy.
So the CIA decided, well, let's not tell the ambassador.
So instead of having two or three or four guys, they chose one guy, Bruce, excuse me, Edward Ellis Smith, who was married and his wife was back in the United States, so he didn't have any carnal relations with his wife going on.
Anyway, so he's chosen.
By who?
By Vladislav Kofchuk.
You know why?
Okay.
And why he was chosen?
Because he was the chief of KGB operations against the American Embassy in Moscow.
That's where Edward L. Smith was.
He was in the embassy, working in the embassy.
So, this one guy knew all the Americans in the embassy.
That was his job for years, he was to know every American that was in there.
Okay, he's the chief of KGB operations against that embassy.
Right.
So, where are you going to find an American, if you can actually turn them to your side, where are you going to find an American to do this in Washington that you are sure?
Is going to work for you.
An American that's going to work for you.
Right.
Okay.
You got to compromise them somehow, right?
Yes, but you have to have a good candidate.
And you don't know who's an American over there that they can't just go on airplanes and go over there and go recruit somebody.
Right.
They got somebody because it turns out that a couple of months before July 1956, Kofshuk recruits Edward Ellis Smith.
He uses his maid, who's actually a KGB major, pretty girl.
And Ellis Smith falls into the trap instantly and they break in.
With the cameras in the middle of this, what do they call it?
Delecto something or other.
It's a word for sex.
They break in over.
During the act, yes, and take pictures of him there.
And he's scared to death.
Anyway, I'll save us a little time by giving too many details.
But what happens is he's recruited by cough shock and he's told a story right away.
You're okay.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
You're going to live.
Fabulously for the rest of your life.
And you won't have to keep doing stuff.
We just need you to do a couple of things for us, and it's all going to be over.
You're going to be paid for life with money, and you're going to have a great job in California.
McCord's the one who tells them all the details of this by the time they get him back.
McCord tells who the details of this?
McCord is the guy who brings him back.
He brings Ellis Smith from Moscow all the way to Washington.
McCord knows that Ellis Smith has been compromised.
Yes.
Okay, got it.
He's got to take him.
He's got to take him over there.
Okay.
And then he has to be tried.
It has to be interrogated.
Now, McCord tells Ella Smith not to worry.
In fact, Kaufshuck told him exactly how to handle the ambassador.
You're going to wait for a couple of weeks.
Almost, you know, this was in, we're talking April, so we're talking almost July.
We're in June.
You finally go to the ambassador and say, Oh, I'm so sorry, I messed up.
I, I made a mistake and I didn't know what to do.
I thought that if I didn't do what they wanted me to do, that they would give me drugs or kidnap me or something like that.
And I really am so sorry that I made this mistake.
And so the ambassador, Boland was his name, he goes back to tell Eisenhower about it.
They meet on the golf course and we have the conversation.
He says, They didn't tell me they had a CIA guy working in my embassy and they took nude pictures of him.
You know, he's.
Anyway, he has this talk with Ike on the golf course about that.
But anyway, so let's get back to the situation here.
So we have this show of contrition in front of the ambassador, which is feigned.
It's on purpose.
So he's going to have to go back.
They can't leave him there.
So that's what they want.
They want him back in Washington.
And so by the time they arrive, he's told what he's got to do.
Now, he had been.
He had been looking for safe houses for Popov because Popov was going to get reassigned to Moscow.
So he had, Ellis Smith had been already learning how to scout for safe houses in Moscow, but he did a terrible job.
Popov said they all sucked, the things that he did.
So when he gets back there, he.
How do you find a good safe house?
What kind of credentials do you have?
Face to face.
Face to face.
Right, face to face.
But what is a safe house?
Where does it got to be?
What does it got to be?
It doesn't matter, so long as nobody knows where it is and the two people that are going to go there know where it is.
Places usually or well, yeah, so it depends when you say public, right in the middle of a park, probably not.
Okay, why is a movie house a great place?
A movie theater, it's dark, yeah, you can't see anything in there, right?
So, um, that's what he's told he's going to do, that's what McCord tells him to do, right?
And McCord can give him some skinny because McCord's grown up there in Washington, so McCord can say, okay, here, these areas of the city are probably the best place, you know, because there's going to be more, whatever.
Finding a Safe House in Beirut00:14:26
You know, so that's what he does.
And it takes quite a while for him to come up with a set of places that fits the bill.
In the meantime, he's been thrown out of the CIA.
And while he's walking around looking for these things, he looks like a hobo who's down on his luck.
He's jobless.
He's been thrown out of the CIA.
This is what the FBI knows.
They're not interested.
Hoover's Bucket Brigade thinks this guy knows nothing now.
He's a nobody.
So they pay no attention to him.
That was part of the way, too, to make sure that he would.
He would look penniless.
You would think after he came to them and told them that story about how they caught him in that honey trap that they would be keeping an eye on him.
No.
That's early on.
Okay.
So, in other words, they know that he said, okay, I did it and I'm sorry.
Right?
Right.
So, what are you going to do?
You're going to keep him in the CIA?
Hell no.
You're going to throw him out.
But you're still going to keep an eye on him.
No, you don't keep an eye on him because that's Hoover's job is to keep the eye on him.
Okay.
So, now they did keep an eye on him, but not the good part of the CIA, not the people that do.
That were working with cough shock were the Americans in the CIA who were in on this operation.
So nobody got in their way.
Everybody in the CIA thought, they're in charge.
McCord's in charge of this.
He's a highfalutin guy, had been.
So nobody questioned anything in the CIA about this.
But you only had the FBI to deal with.
Now, the FBI never did catch him the whole time, it was several months.
We're talking about by the time he started scouting out the places, there's no way that Kofstuck and the guys are going to go buy their tickets and get their false passports until those safe houses are in place.
And so they didn't ask for their credentials until November of 1956.
And then it takes a few weeks.
By the time they were ready to go, it's in December.
But anyway, so Ellis Smith has been going around doing this stuff for months.
And so he's told by McCord, even at the very beginning, while he's going through the interrogation, don't worry, we're going to be giving you money on the side every single month.
And it was, I have the name of it here, it's just one of these organizations that was CIA connected that could give money.
And so, but the big money was going to be later on when it was all over, when he could go to California.
And he was told what his job was going to be.
He was going to have a high position, a very nice office in the Hoover Institute of the University of Stanford.
Now, the guy had already divorced his wife after all this stuff, and so he married a Russian woman.
I still have to investigate.
I want to investigate the dates for all that.
But anyway, he was asked to stay around after the meeting.
The meetings took place in the first week of January.
They went off like, you know, no glitches.
The meetings with these two KGB guys and Soli.
Three of them, yeah.
Three of them and Soli.
That's right.
And met in the movie theaters.
That's right.
And so, but the next thing was.
And Soli gave them the technical details for the U2.
He did, but he wasn't done yet.
There was one other thing that Khrushchev wanted, which was enough information on Popov to hang him without betraying McCord and Soli's participation in this whole affair.
And that wasn't, that was not hard.
That's they knew about Popov way back, and he was so insecure that they just were just waiting for him to make mistakes.
So, what happens is, so wait, okay, explain to me again, like I'm a third grader, why Khrushchev wanted to get rid of Popov this early because it is before Popov was giving nuclear secrets and all kinds of stuff.
This guy was high up in the GRU.
And how did he know about that?
How did who know?
How did Khrushchev know about Popov giving all these secrets to the CIA because he was making mistakes?
He was making mistakes and he was going across the borders in Berlin, and his technique wasn't good.
His tradecraft was not good.
He was seen in a lot of places.
He was a drunk, wasn't he?
Well, he was drunk, and he was also married and he was having an affair with Bielich all along.
And she ended up turning on him later on because of a political thing.
In one of the countries in Yugoslavia where she was from.
But anyway, the point is that there were two or three different areas that were very, looked very good, that were connected with where he had been.
His remit had been two places.
He had spent time.
The GRU was one of the people that were well represented in Russian presidencies, not presidencies, in Russian presidencies.
People that are working jobs in Berlin and in Vienna.
Those were the two biggest things.
They're in East Europe, really, if you think about Vienna, but it was neutral.
It was one of the first ones to go neutral.
And then when you talk about Berlin, I mean, you are in the middle of East Germany.
It's not like you're in Germany or something.
There is no Germany.
Germany's been cut up and so on.
It's a very dangerous place to be.
But that's where.
Popoff had worked.
And so, what you want to do is get somebody who can go, an American who can go to those places and ask questions about Popoff.
And there's no better person to do that than Sully, right?
Nobody can ask him why he's asking questions.
He's a senior officer from the Office of Security.
And besides which, Popoff's the guy who's created all this mess that's Endangering Sully himself.
He's got to protect himself in all of this.
So he's got some skin in the game to make sure that they get rid of this guy and not unmask him.
And he's pretty bright.
Unlike other guys who are drunk, like Philby, Sully was not a drunk.
He didn't drink.
At this point in time, did Khrushchev, was he aware that Popov knew about Sully?
Um.
I doubt it.
Why would he know that?
I don't know.
No.
So Popov just knows about but Popov eventually found out about Soli somehow.
Yes, but not his name.
He just knew there was a mole.
Yeah, because he had overheard in a GRU meeting that there was a mole at the highest echelons who had the technical details.
Khrushchev knew about the mole.
He may have known the name.
There was really no need for him to know the name.
He probably did know the name.
But you wouldn't want that name to get around because both sides were penetrated.
And so there's very few people that understand what's happening here.
But where were we before you asked that question?
So Khrushchev wanted these guys, these three guys, the three GRU guys that went to the U.S. to not only get the technical details.
No, they weren't GRU.
Those were KGB.
KGB, the three KGB guys that went to the U.S.
He wanted them to not only get the technical details for the U2, but also wanted them to figure out how to get Popov.
Well, they weren't going to participate in that.
They are KGB guys, so they can't walk into a CIA station in Berlin or Vienna and ask questions.
Right.
What we're looking for is the footprint that Popov made when he went across the line in Berlin and so on and talked to CIA guys.
So you're going to go to CIA stations to ask these questions to hang Popov with.
Right.
Well, you can't have Russians going in there and doing that.
You have to have an American.
And you have to have an American who, when he asks a question, nobody says, Excuse me, sir, why are you asking that question?
So Sully goes on his first trip over there.
After the meeting between Kaufschak and Gouk and Kiesloff with Sully, Sully, and that's January, in February and March, Sully goes over and you've got the map of where he went.
He sits down in Zurich for a couple of weeks, which is about 30 to 40 minutes away from those two, Vienna and Berlin.
And that's what he's doing.
Here's the map.
Now, when you look at that map, the thing that always bothered me about it that I couldn't explain, all this stuff I understood.
You've got to hold it up next to the microphone.
Yeah, all these things.
A little bit higher.
There you go.
Right there.
Perfect.
There's the map.
Here's France.
Here's Poland.
Here's Prague.
Here's Switzerland right in the middle of everything.
And there's CIA stations there in Zurich and in Geneva.
But anyway, A lot of the times later on when Sully would go, he would always do it in Paris because he would meet KGB guys in Paris, which was full of KGB guys.
But that's the other story.
Let's leave that alone.
1962.
And so this is back in 1956, 57.
And so here is where he spends almost all his time.
All these other things are just legs that within 24 hours you're on your way, except for Paris.
He'd always stay two days.
Anyway, why did he come in?
He comes in down here in Rome.
And actually, before Rome, he started in Beirut.
So he went from Beirut to Rome, from Rome to Zurich, and that's where he stayed most of the whole time on this long trip.
It was about two and a half, three weeks or so.
He's here because he can go and do these things from this is his home base.
Okay.
In Zurich.
Can you show the camera?
Sorry, point it towards the camera a little bit more.
Oh, okay.
There you go.
So later on, when I was writing that book, Uncovering Pop Off's Mall, I figured out.
Why he went to Beirut first.
You see, because Kim Philby had always been the guy that the KGB used to get all the information out of Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence.
They had worked together in Great Britain and they got drunk together, and Angleton told him everything.
Then they went to Washington, and Philby became the liaison between MI6 and the CIA.
Philby was the guy that got to give the secrets of the United States, of CIA and MI6, until.
There was a problem with a couple of guys, Burgess and McLean, had to run to Russia.
And the stink wore off on him because they were his friends.
And so they interrogated him.
They couldn't prove it, they suspected him.
And so what happens was he resigned.
And that was the way they resolved it.
He resigned in 51 when the CIA was started.
Okay.
Okay.
So now we're talking about Sully and McCord going there in 51, but not being used in this operation until much later.
McCord was able to be here all the time because that was his job.
He could travel over there.
He was the only guy who did.
Right, right.
So that's why he's so interesting and important to us, because we have to have these communication things.
But anyway, so what happens is after five years of Philby not having any work at all, they reactivate him to go over to Beirut and look at, because that's where the crisis is, okay, in the Middle East.
It's very close to Beirut, it's right in the middle of the crisis.
So they send Sully there first.
And what happens is, excuse me, I've got ahead of myself.
That's where Philby is sent to, and his job there is going to be just open source information.
And he's going to give that to the CIA guy that is running the CIA station in Beirut.
Okay.
So he's over there now.
And Philby has a father who's well known all over the world.
The place he.
Yes.
And he had a mountaintop right over Beirut.
And so, while when, at the time that Philby comes there, and at the very time, believe it or not, the very time that Sully shows up in Beirut, Philby's father vacates the house, takes all his kids on a vacation, and it's empty.
And so, you have the KGB who needs a replacement for Philby and has had since 51.
And you have Philby alone on top of the mountain right over Beirut who knows all about how to use Angleton.
And that's why the first leg of this trip solely was sent to Beirut.
Okay.
Finally, I got my answer.
How I Finally Found the Answer00:12:24
It took me a long time.
I never realized.
I thought, what the hell is Beirut doing in this trip?
Because I know that it has to be.
How did you finally find this?
Because I started working on the Philby case.
And I got deep in it.
I own every book on the stuff you can imagine on the MI6 guy.
So that's it.
It was very easy once, as they say in China, very easy if you know how.
But not quick.
Holy crap, man.
You had to do a lot of research to put all these pieces together.
Well, it was the last four months that we started working the whole MI6 stuff in.
And it just was fantastic.
People should have watched this series on TV.
It was six episodes called A Traitor Amongst Friends.
And they messed up the Angleton stuff a little bit, but it was really accurate in a lot of ways.
And it was more about Elliot, who was Philby's case officer, if I can say that, at the time.
And he let him get on the boat.
He could have stopped it, he could have arrested it.
But they let in 1960, I think, is when he eventually was so drunk all the time with his wife because he knew that the end was coming.
And he got on a Russian boat and went over to Moscow.
And thank goodness he wrote a book about himself.
So we don't have to prove it with documents.
And Philby actually admitted in his book everything that he did.
Yeah, he did.
What he said to Angleton, he said, Angleton was so embarrassed.
He told about all that stuff.
So, you know, the Sully stuff, I had to, you know, Sully didn't write a book, okay?
Philby did.
So I had to do a little bit of work to put together who it was that the KGB finally used to replace Philby with.
Wow.
What were the implications of him spilling the beans on all that?
Did he get in any trouble?
Or did he give a fuck?
Was he on his deathbed, anyways?
Who's he?
Philby.
Phil be writing that book and talking about everything that he did.
I imagine that that wasn't happening.
He was safe.
He was given the Heroes Award in Moscow for all the years he spent.
Oh, way back.
This guy, back in the 40s, was already working for him.
But they didn't want him to leave the country.
That never happened.
They let his wife come over for once to visit with him for a while, but she didn't stay for very long.
I'm sure he died of liver.
So, the closest to the river eventually.
Okay, so what happened after Khrushchev got these details of the spy?
He finally got the details of the U 2s.
He finally got what he needed, all the info he needed on Popov, right?
That's right.
And they arrested him.
They arrested Popov without compromising solely.
Or McCord or anything.
It was all stuff that happened in places that Popov went.
So, there was no, it was, they could use it.
Because the reason they had to be very careful for people who are listening who may not be.
Keeping up basically the reason they needed to arrest Popov for they needed to find other reasons completely disconnected from Soli.
So, because events in his life, events in his life, right?
Events in his life.
Because if they did arrest him that had anything with any sort of connection to Soli, it would have.
How do you know this stuff?
Is the reason.
How do you know?
And the reason is well, because he was insecure and he did this, this, and this, and that you know, wasn't that hard.
But uh, Soli put the nail in the coffin there, but but you know what.
When you look at it now, there was something more important than that.
And that's the Beirut trip.
So, you know, Khrushchev got the things he wanted out of it.
But the other thing that they're getting out of it, that his spy service is getting out of it, is the new guy.
And this is a bonus that Khrushchev will.
He stays in power for quite some time until after Kennedy's death when he's purged.
So he ends up getting a new mole, even better than Philby.
This guy doesn't drink.
This guy is pretty safe.
The thing he didn't really understand was that one day, and he did change the tags on his suitcase.
The reason we know this is the last chapter in the book is about.
A defector, a Navy defector from Russia that we got a hold of, and he was thrown back and used up.
Sully had to escort him there, and Sully basically helped turn him over to the Russians who killed him.
And his wife was with him.
It was supposed to be a trip.
And it's a sad chapter because on the way home, Sully was in the plane with her and never said a thing.
Anyway, it was a big feather in the hat for Khrushchev.
They solved everything.
They got Kitty Hawk, which we haven't had time to talk about.
It's another operation that KGB had to save Nisenko.
We haven't talked about him either, the Nisenko defection, things like that.
But what happens ultimately is that the people in the CIA's Soviet Russia division A battle erupts over KGB guys that came over and they were supposedly bona fide, but they weren't.
They were provocations.
All of them were.
What does that mean, bona fide?
It means, in other words, if they came over, they really were a defector.
They really defected to us.
That's bona fide.
Okay.
But if they're not, they're a provocation.
Okay.
They're not bona fide.
They're malified.
Okay.
And so they were all, none of them were bona fide.
But what happens was Sully and his guys began to acquire power.
In 1955 and 56, and especially with Hoover.
Hoover did not want anything to be bona fide because if it was, that meant he missed it.
So he went along with the KGB's wishes that these guys were bona fide.
They really were.
So, what I meant to say is if they were false defectors and he missed that, that would be bad for him.
So the short.
Version of the story is that there was a battle that raged inside of the CIA for three or four years, and Sully won.
And he had the help of the director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, gave him charge of everything to do, to decide what had happened and who should be, you know.
And so Bagley was put out to pasture.
He was our best guy.
A lot of things happened, but.
They sent new guys in, a guy by the name of Kochnov, who was there as part of this operation to finish the job of the KGB's takeover of the CIA.
Kitty Hawk was the last death knell of anything authentic going on in the Soviet Russia division or in the CIA.
And so Sully, who kept his mouth shut the whole time, finally.
Felt that he could come out in the open.
And so he openly went along with Nosenko being bona fide, Golitsyn, who gave us good stuff, saying he was not bona fide, and this guy, Artemanov, wow, we should use him in an operation or something.
This was the KGB agenda.
So he went along with publicly, and eventually he sent a memo to Helms asking him to sign it to make sure that he could prove that.
And so later on in the House Select Committee, he saw that document.
That Helms had signed about what was going on, this big argument.
They asked him, Why did you sign Sully's thing?
And he said, Well, because I had to.
We weren't getting any work done.
I had to take the bone out of my throat.
He admitted in front of the House Select Committee that he didn't believe the document he had signed.
And they were just flummoxed at that.
And that was his answer that somebody had to win in order to do any work.
Everything had stopped because the two sides were.
And Bagley was.
He couldn't refute his arguments.
And so they had to just muscle their way through it.
And so they didn't fire Bagley.
They gave him a job overseas in Brussels.
And that's where Malcolm Blunt met him.
And Malcolm Blunt and I were close and had been since I wrote Oswald and the CIA, which we don't have that one on the table here.
Anyway, it's a.
Messy, complicated story, and black and white you can find on both sides of the divide in the Cold War and in the world.
As far as Oswald goes, we left off with Oswald the last time we spoke about him a little bit earlier.
He defected, he falsely defected to Moscow.
And this information, the documents regarding this came out publicly how long ago?
Did the U.S. release these documents that?
Most of them, the million, six million pieces of paper were released in 2017, 2018.
2017, 2018, right.
And this is so this is publicly known that he defected to Moscow, the false defection to Moscow.
He was there in Minsk for a while, staying there, didn't want to come out.
And that's where a lot of the Ukrainian KGBs were training at a high school.
Okay.
He didn't want to come out until he got the mess, until he got the heads up, it's time to come home.
He was having a blast.
He married a pretty woman.
There's pictures of him sitting there in Minsk.
It's where the KGB Higher School of Education is.
And those are the people, some of the teachers in that KGB school were the ones who were interrogating him.
And he knew it.
And they said he knew he was being interrogated.
Anyway, he was having a great time.
With his friends, and some of them were at that institute, and some of them weren't.
They were just from around town.
His place where he lived was right downtown on the main street, where the entire cadet corps of that KGB school ran by his building every day, every morning.
And so there came a point where it was time to come home, right?
There was nothing else for him to do over there.
And one thing that they were interested in would be interrogating him to see what the KGB had done.
To get his story.
They don't get on the phone call and call up Oswald and how's it going over there, Lee?
He had to come home to tell his story.
And boy, when he gets off the boat, there's a traffic jam in the world, man.
It's called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
You name it, it's going on in the middle of 62.
This is when Lemnitzer, failing to get what he wanted out of Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs, failing what he wanted to get out of Kennedy in Berlin, two times.
Lemitser and the Cuban Crisis00:15:36
Which would have been Armageddon for us that we got out of that.
Then comes the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And Lemitser says to himself, well, you know, Kennedy didn't go for it, you know, in the.
Can you explain that meeting that they had?
There was a meeting, I forget the actual name of the meeting where Kennedy had to go to with Lemitser and all these guys.
No, I was just getting up to that.
Okay, sorry.
Yeah.
So Lemitser's idea, why he does this, why he says this to Kennedy, is because he's thinking maybe.
You know, going into the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy didn't want to do because it looked like what it was was we were beating up on a little country that hadn't really done anything.
So maybe if we give him a pretext, he'll be interested.
And so the pretext was well, we shoot a couple of Cubans that are making out in dinghies trying to go to Miami.
And in Miami, oh, we're going to shoot down a plane, by the way, over the Gulf.
That's Operation Northwoods.
Yes, this is all part of Northwoods, and we're going to kill some people in Miami, and then we're going to blow some stuff up, and probably killing people in Washington.
And we're going to tell the American people that Castro did this.
Okay.
We're going to tell the American people Castro did it so that the American people will want to go to war with Cuba.
And that is what I say, you know, and I say it in the book and into the storm.
I already have that part of it in the book.
You know, that was he.
He violated his oath of office and sullied the uniforming war.
I said, That's in my book.
That's the way, and I'm going to say it and say it out loud, and I'll keep saying it out loud.
You don't go do things like that to trick the American people into going to war.
It's just, we don't do that.
And when you do that kind of stuff, what do we got here?
It's not a republic.
It's like a tyranny.
And it does eventually become one.
But it's a very sad situation.
Now, fortunately, and in some ways it's unfortunate, but the fortunate thing about what happened is in that meeting between Kennedy and Lemitscher, Kennedy told him to get out.
I'm not going to do this.
His precise words are, I put in the book, he doesn't swear or cuss or anything, but he makes it clear.
We're not going to do what he wants.
And so Lemitzer is turned down.
Lemitzer is coming up to his end of service and his end of tour in the summer.
And with a flick of a pen, John Kennedy could have had him extended as a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with an act of Congress, which is easy to do.
He didn't do that.
He let that go and he sent him over to Europe and re extended his term of service, which would have ended in the spring of 63.
Anyway, Lemitser ended up staying as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for eons and it kept getting extended by other.
Kennedy gets dead within a year.
So Lemitser goes on and on.
But what Lemitser didn't know.
is about Operation Gladio.
I mentioned it briefly in this conversation here that we were having.
And you see, Lemitscher knew about Operation Gladio because he was actually working as a one-star general with a bunch of generals that were putting together the whole thing to protect Europe from a Russian invasion, the Soviet invasion.
And he was actually the guy who had a lot to do with what weapons were going to be taken from weapon stocks of World War II, whatever, to send them over there.
And so he knew.
And he also knew because the SAC-UR is one of the two or three people at the top.
He is the head of NATO, basically.
And he knows about those two committees.
But he also knows a lot about them because he helped supply those weapons way back in 1948.
Kennedy has no idea about Operation Gladio, has no idea that they have these committees full of thugs and assassins and all those kinds of people, right?
So he delivered into the hands of Lemnitzer a bunch of guys that could be sent back to the United States.
They look like, you know, they're assassins.
And you can have a ton of those guys running around Dealey Plaza and it just flooded the zone with stuff.
There's all kinds of things.
And people that turned up in Dealey Plaza that were from over there and these bad guys, you know, that had records of doing stuff like that.
If you get into the Dealey Plaza stuff, you'll see it.
You'll see, you know, depending on which books you read, this guy was used, the guy who was doing a lot of stuff in Spain, or this guy, you know, the ex Nazi guys.
That were in Germany and so on and so forth end up being running around.
And all they are is they're just.
What do you call it when you flood the zone so you can't find what you're looking for?
Right.
Just throw more needles in the haystack.
Yeah, that's right.
So, anyway, Lemnitzer is over there, but here's the problem who replaced him?
Maxwell Taylor did.
Now, At the beginning of this conversation, we started talking about like the Kennedy assassination, and I was going to draw a line between the beginning of his presidency when he said no to the Bay of Pigs all the way up to when he got assassinated.
I called it a coup, I called it basically a military coup supported by elements of the CIA, those that few that were privy to it.
Um, so Taylor, Taylor, I call him in my books the Trojan horse inside the gates.
Not just of President Kennedy, but the Kennedy family itself.
So, what happens?
How does this happen?
Lemitscher was working for Taylor in the Eisenhower administration.
Taylor was the chief of staff of the army, and Lemitscher was the deputy chief of staff of the army.
And so Taylor decided that we should change our policies, military policies, from just these spasmodic nuclear weapons.
If we got into war, that we should be able to, if we get into a war, be able to.
To have one without using nuclear weapons.
This was called flexible response and he wrote and, and he was, all the generals didn't like it, uh.
And so he realized that he he, you know, he was of no use and there was no way he was.
He decided to leave and he wrote a book uncertain, Trumpet on it, and this whole thing about flexible response.
And so when Kennedy decides that he wants to do an investigation of the Bay Of Pigs failure, his brother Bobby, all of a sudden is, is put in charge of a lot of stuff, because Whereas he was just the attorney general after the Bay Of Pigs, guess what happens to Bobby Kennedy.
He's still the attorney general, but he sits in every meeting from that day on.
Not at the table, but in a corner, in a chair, empowered to pipe up anytime he wants and tell somebody, no, you're wrong about that.
Now, you have all these senior guys, military and civilian, that Bobby pops off to, right?
And so they don't like him.
Nobody likes Bobby.
He's like a rat terrier.
You know, protecting his brother after what happened.
And so all of a sudden, here comes Taylor.
He's brought in to this committee and in charge of it, along with Bobby.
Now, it's amazing.
Everybody else hates Bobby Kennedy, but not Taylor.
He loves him, he likes the president's brother.
And so what he knows is what he wants is he wants to get control.
He is not a Kennedy supporter.
He is, in fact, there's a fear that having Taylor in the White House, fear in the military that, uh oh, we've got a guy over there.
How can we do our job with the new Joint Chiefs of Staff, whatever they were, if the guy who's got the president's ear can go against us?
Right.
But they fixed that.
Taylor made a deal.
Well, Lambert, sir.
That, listen, you tell me what you want to do first, and I'll vet ways in which I can get Kennedy to go along with it.
So they were working together from the very beginning.
Now, the next thing is we get to the end of 61, and Kennedy decides that he wants, and everybody wants combat troops into Vietnam, even at this time.
By the way, Lemitzer wants war in Cuba.
Laos and Vietnam all at the same time.
How can you do that?
You don't even have enough ground forces to fight one war.
Right.
There's one answer.
How are you going to do that?
Nuclear weapons.
You don't have to use ground forces when you're going to blow the pogies out of everybody.
Anyway, back on the ranch here.
So here comes Taylor.
And he becomes.
So right after this investigation is over of the Bay of Pigs, he learns from Bobby.
That John Kennedy is his brother, the president, wants him to take over the CIA because he's going to fire Dulles.
And he wants Bobby to take over the CIA?
No, Bobby tells Taylor that his father, I mean, excuse me, that his brother wants him to take over the CIA.
Got it, okay.
He's going to take over the CIA.
And Taylor says, nah, I don't think so.
My wife and I, we've had too much travel overseas, and I'd rather stay here.
Now, look, if you have something for me dealing with military things, I'd be happy to try and help out.
Right?
So, okay, he makes him his military assistant.
And he sends him over in December.
He sends him over to have a look around in Cuba.
No, excuse me, not in Cuba, in Vietnam.
He sends him to look at Vietnam, which is starting to bubble up.
Pretty bad, actually.
A lot of things going on in terms of attacks, Viet Cong attacks.
But bottom line is, he was sent there with a direct order from the president to come home with a recommendation not to send combat troops.
It was phony.
He was just, that was his job.
That was his job.
His job was to go over there, look around, and come home and say, we don't need combat troops.
He comes home and puts a proposal on the table to send combat troops under flood relief.
Task force cover.
Kennedy gets absurdly angry with him for doing that.
He tries to recall all copies of the memo, destroy it, and then he plants a false story in the New York Times saying that he came back and recommended against combat.
Kennedy did this.
He does that to get even with, he plants stories, and they don't know what to do about it because they know that he's behind it.
But anyway, and then, and so you would think that Kennedy would just fire him right there on the spot.
But the problem was that not only did he worm his way into the administration, he wormed his way into the Kennedy family.
And so they loved him.
And Bobby Kennedy named his second son or his third.
Bobby Kennedy named one of his sons Maxwell.
After him?
Yeah.
And that guy named his son Maxwell.
Wow.
So Kennedy lets him stay on, but he can't deal with Vietnam.
He loses his ability to recommend things on Vietnam.
But he's a weasel, and he manages what happens by the time we go into 62.
Things are so bad that things are going to change.
And so we have a new command element, the military.
What was there was the military advisory group.
The advisory group is going to be replaced by MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, a command, not just an advisory.
So MACV comes in, and the guy, General Carter, not General Carter, who is it?
No, I forget the name of the guy who is assigned, not M'Garb.
Maybe I'll think of his name in a minute.
So whoever it was that he sent as the MACV commander was actually Taylor's choice.
And he was Taylor's protege.
So, in effect, Taylor is still running Vietnam because the new MACV commander is his guy.
So, after all the trouble we went through with the trip there and getting them smacked down by JFK, he's still pretty much in control of what's going on in Vietnam.
Taylor Still Running Vietnam00:14:54
So, we go through 62.
There's a huge order of battle thing going on that I describe in JFK in Vietnam where.
Uh, the all the forces, the Vietcong forces are, are cut in in, not just in the half, but 60 are eliminated after a big study is done and uh, the true story of what's going on in Vietnam is not given to Kennedy.
The false story he's given is that there's not that many troops and the truth is that there's a lot of them.
Now, what Kennedy had decided to do, there's three options in Vietnam, we get out completely, We invade with troops.
Those are off the table.
What's on the table for Kennedy is an advisory effort.
But when those numbers were discovered, how many Viet Cong were there, the advisory effort was dead on arrival.
So they had to hide it from Kennedy.
But guess who knew all about it?
The vice president got all the true reporting and the president got all the false reporting.
And I know about it because the guy who was actually managing Lyndon Johnson, who was the vice president at the time, Howard Burris was his name.
And he took me to several places.
I met with him 15, 20 times over a course of years, and he told me the whole story.
He told me that whole story.
He didn't tell me some stories that I figured out later, but he knew that he had to give me something.
And that was a big deal.
Nobody had heard about the Order of Battle deception that had taken place in the spring of 62.
Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time there, but that's a big deal that had never been put out before and it is, and it and in army books on the war they they have to use that now because it's true and I was able to interview all the people that were involved in it.
So so things continue to worsen all through the year.
Kennedy's busy with Cuban Missile Crisis and a few other things on the planet.
You know that it's not all about.
It's not all about Vietnam at that time.
And so by the end of the year, Kennedy starts sending people over there and sees that he's being lied to.
And so he, so what's happening is that Kennedy starts making a plan to get out of Vietnam.
And at the time, Kennedy is allowing somebody else.
And not Taylor to be his advisor, and that's going to be McNamara.
He reads, he got so sick and tired of being asked to send combat troops that he blew up at the end of 1961, early 62, when they put MACV together.
And he brought in a lot of people he fired, including Dulles and others that he fired and the replacements into one room.
And he walks in, and it was short and sweet.
He said, Look here.
You either get with my program or you get out.
And I want, who is it?
Who's going to carry out my policy in Vietnam?
Who's it going to be?
McNamara, the defense secretary, puts up his hand and said, I will, boss.
Me and L.
That means Lemnitzer.
But anyway, so there were secretary of defense conferences for the rest of the two years regularly.
McNamara would go out and come back and he would go at different times.
But anyway, they fed him all the bad informations.
So that Kennedy wouldn't know.
So they used Mcnamara as the vehicle, while Burris made sure that Johnson got all the true uh order of battle stuff.
Wow Vietnam, anyway.
Um, i've got to hurry up here because what happens is Kennedy figures it out and they know he's figured it out, and he knows that they know he's figured it out.
So they're kind of like in a game of chicken, as we move into 63, now at this time excuse me, At this time, we move into a situation where something is got to give.
And in these sick deaf conferences that take place in the spring, there's a lot, by the way, there's a lot of big Viet Cong strikes and stuff that are just getting in the news and things like that.
But as we move into the spring of 1963, At one of these SecDef conferences, there's a general there by the name of Krulak.
He ends up being, he's a Marine general.
He ends up being there with, I forgot to mention, I guess, when, I think I did.
Tell me if I didn't, that when Lemonster was sent to SACUR, Taylor gets the job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Right.
Yeah, you said that.
Okay.
So Taylor's now in charge of Vietnam.
All right.
And the guy he works with is General Kruelak.
Now, they made a plan called Commander in Chief Pacific Operational Plan.
34 Alpha.
What that was, was a plan to invade Vietnam and everything from pinpricks all the way up to invasion and all kinds, you know, nuclear warfare, everything.
It was a total plan to take, to win a war in Vietnam.
And this is not.
This is also around the time DARPA was created and they created a bunch of different things, the chemical warfare, That they were.
Well, that's going to come after Kennedy's death.
Okay.
That's when we send half a million troops over there.
No, all we had was advisors.
We weren't doing the defoliants and stuff during Kennedy.
Now, there were some aircraft that were being flown, that were supposed to be flown by Vietnamese, and they weren't.
They just had some cooks in the back seat.
And so it was technically breaking some of Kennedy's rules.
So there were some things that were over the line, but nothing like what you saw in Vietnam.
So we just, I mean, we just kind of got into the weeds with everything that was going with the SecDef meetings and the Secretary of Defense.
We were on 1963.
1963.
In the spring.
And that's when they started to come up with a plan to invade Vietnam and to be ready to do that.
It was called Out Plan 34A.
That's the short version.
It's also a Commander in Chief Pacific designator on that, but we don't need to talk about that.
It's just that that's what they were doing.
And what happened was Taylor and Kurlak didn't want, what they did was they suppressed it, they didn't let that go back.
The contents and conclusions of a SecDef conference are supposed to go.
To McNamara and Kennedy.
Well, they suppress this because it's war in Vietnam.
And at the same time, the first one of these Buddhists sits in the middle of a street intersection, douses himself in gasoline, and lights himself and kills himself.
He's only the first of many.
And in Kennedy, he just gets completely upset.
Why is this happening?
How come we didn't know this?
Anyway, it was symptomatic of the whole.
Political bottom falling out in Vietnam.
There was no support for the regime.
What was going on?
The Diem and his brother knew they were very corrupt and kept mostly, they wanted troops and even American forces there just to protect them, not to defeat the communists.
They were just trying to stay in power themselves.
So it was just a mess.
And so Kennedy realized that his plan.
Was going to be to pull out after he was reelected.
And that's basically all of the troops wouldn't be pulled out until 65.
And he could say things like, it's their war, they have to win it.
He did that.
But then he would say stuff like, but, you know, we have to help them.
So he said things that misled people into thinking and was used after his death by some books saying that he would have done what LBJ did.
But there was no way that that was true.
He just didn't come straight with the American people because he was afraid, as he was on other things, African American civil rights and things like that.
They helped him get elected and he didn't want to do anything until after he was reelected because he thought he would lose the Southern.
Democratic votes, which was the base of the South.
So you have this situation now in 63 where everything's going wrong.
And he realizes, and we need to talk about this too, because he will actually go on television and say things.
He wants to taunt with the Russians and he wants to really do civil rights and he wants to pull out of Vietnam.
Didn't he have a direct line with Khrushchev at this time, at this point?
Didn't he have a phone in his house and in the Oval Office?
Yeah, I think of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was where that happened.
But But the point is that what is he going to do, right?
He realizes that it's over in Vietnam and he can't wait until another whole year and a half or something to do anything about this because by that time it'll be too late to withdraw.
There'll be no public support for it.
And so what he decides to do is to accelerate the withdrawal plan.
So the new plan is that he's going to pull out 100 advisors before the end of the year.
And he draws his line in the sand.
He says, I want real troops.
I don't just want onesies and twosies coming out and being replaced.
I want to see, and helicopters too.
So he wants a real withdrawal to start in 1963.
And then after he gets reelected, all the troops will come out.
Now, this was kept secret for a while because he didn't know what his.
Opponents were going to do to him about it and what the American public would do, what the newspapers would do, and all that kind of stuff.
So he kept it to himself, but he sent Mack, Namara, and Taylor out together at the end of September 1963.
And their job was to do the same thing as back in 1961.
They were supposed to go over there and go visit all the hamlets and stuff and count their chickens and hens and whatnot and come home and recommend that we begin the withdrawal from Vietnam.
Mm hmm.
And they did.
Now, on the way back home, the stopover in Honolulu, the number two guy in the State Department, his name was Sullivan.
There were a couple of Sullivans running around, but he was one of them.
Anyway, he said he got a hold of Taylor.
And he said, We can't do this.
We're not pulling troops out of Vietnam.
We've got to put more in.
If this stays in the report, he says, I'm going to write a.
A counter report.
And so they said, okay, no problem.
We'll take it out.
So you don't see it in the draft of the report as it stood at Honolulu when they were on their way home.
So they come home.
It's the first couple of days of October.
And the helicopter lands in the garden there, and Taylor and McNamara walk into the White House and into the Oval Office.
And they sit down with a report, and the report looks like it was in Honolulu.
And there's all these press people in there, it's a press op and everything.
And so, after the press is out, before the conversation starts, McNamara and Taylor get up and say, Just a minute.
And they leave the room, they go into the next room, and they put the withdrawal plan in the folder.
And they come out, and it's just fucking pandemonium.
Excuse my French.
For the rest of the day, there's people down in the basement that are saying, This is crazy.
Why are we doing this?
This can't happen.
And so it ends up being a fairly rigorous meeting that Kennedy goes through and tells people that the decision's been made.
And you can get out of here if you don't like it, but it's over.
There's no argument anymore.
This is what we're doing.
Now, this isn't in the newspapers, but this is what happened, and all the people that were involved in this have written their stories, and it's in the books everywhere.
What happened that day when they found out that Kennedy was proposing to start the withdrawal from Vietnam?
He didn't want to put it in a national security action memorandum, which is what happens when a new policy is going to be made.
But, of course, Taylor.
Was on the wrong side.
He told all of his buddies what was going on.
So the buzz got all around.
And so it got into the newspapers.
You know, that Kennedy was proposing a withdrawal from Vietnam.
Kennedy's Secret Withdrawal Plan00:14:48
And so McGeorge Bundy, his national security advisor, who was a hawk but was, I contend, loyal to Kennedy, and I can explain why.
But anyway, he says, look, Bosch, if it's in the newspapers, we might as well put it in an ANSAM.
And they did.
So even though the decision was made and Discussed on the 2nd of October.
It wasn't until the 6th or the 7th of October that they actually cut NSAM 263, which was the withdrawal from Vietnam, and another part of it, which was an instruction to the station in Vietnam.
And it didn't say what it was, but it was a coup against the Diem brothers.
That was also in the NSAM that day.
And so this is October.
So Kennedy is coming into the open, but he doesn't.
What he does is he sends Taylor out, no, McNamara, he sends McNamara out onto the steps of the White House to explain this NSAM.
And he explains.
So the reason he does that is to make it look like it's a recommendation of McNamara, but Kennedy hasn't decided yet.
That way, if something goes this way or that way, he's not on the hook.
And that's the way things are going.
But everybody on the inside knows what the hell is going on here.
Now, So now we have the DM brothers are going to get murdered.
Kennedy has this.
You see this picture of his hand over his forehead.
Oh, my God.
And so, actually, that was another.
He had to do that a couple of times.
But in any event, they were at the point where it was going to happen.
And so, after this.
What the Diem assassination really requires is another SecDef conference in order to come up with a new policy because there's a regime change, right, in South Vietnam, right?
So now the Secretary of Defense has to go talk to everybody, and everybody goes out to Honolulu for this one.
And everybody, all the top guys send their guy who does their, not reporters, their publicity person.
Everybody who was anything in the hierarchy of the establishment sent it.
So there's a lot of press there as well.
And it turns out that what happened that day was suppressed, except for the briefing book.
You see, the date that it happened was 20 November 1963.
This is 48 hours before the bullets are going to kill Kennedy.
48 hours before they're all out there in Honolulu.
And there's McNamara, and Taylor's doing the briefing.
It's a military briefing.
And the briefing says, you know what, we've been wrong this whole time about winning the war.
Actually, we're losing it.
It's the first time that the optimistic interlude that began in the beginning of 62 with the OB reporting is now over.
It starts back then and it ends two days before the president's murder.
They tell the truth at this place.
But George Bundy, the.
The National Security Advisor, he was there too.
And I, there was a second NSAM that was made, not 263, this is in November now, this is at the very end.
A new NSAM was created before that conference and for it by McGeorge Bundy.
And what it said was we need to intensify the war effort.
But we will use South Vietnamese forces to do so.
And McGeorge Bundy drafted that up.
And that's the reason I believe that he was loyal to Kennedy.
Because if he thought Kennedy was going to die, he wouldn't have done that.
He thought Kennedy would be awake to see that because Kennedy could have proved that then, Sam.
Well, guess what happened?
It got changed right after, with hours after the assassination.
And McGeorge Bundy had to take that and walk around Washington to get input.
Into it.
And there were a lot of happy to glads changes, but there was one paragraph which had restricted the paragraph that restricted new intensification of the war to South Vietnamese forces was changed.
And there were two big lines through it.
It wasn't a happy to glads, there were two slashes in that whole paragraph.
Right.
So I got a hold of McGeorge Bundy and I said, I need to, you know, to ask you about, you know, the stuff you did out there.
He said, I don't remember being there in Honolulu.
And I said, oh, sir, you know, I'm sorry to tell you, but, you know, your name's on a lot of the papers and things.
And he said, look, do me a favor.
Would you send them to me?
And I said, sure.
And I did.
And he got hold of me right away.
He said, oh, yes, you're right.
I remember now.
A lot of people were very upset psychologically when the president was killed, okay, especially in the ones in his administration.
They were it was kind of like, you know, being in a new planet somewhere.
You know, it just wasn't, they weren't ready for this.
And I think a lot of them did suppress what they heard that day.
But anyway, McBundy, McGeorge Bundy was totally straight with me.
He said, that was me.
Yeah, and that was me.
That was me walking that NSAM around to see if there were any changes.
And I said, okay, well, let's go to page three.
Who, who, are those your slash marks, you know, through there?
And he said, yeah.
And I said, well, who told you to do that?
And he said, LBJ.
LBJ told me to do that.
And the new language.
In the, in the new, in the new NSAM 273 version 2 that was published that weekend while Kennedy's corpse is still laying in state in the, in Rotunda, said, there was, there was no uh, there was no cap on it, there would, it didn't rule.
It didn't say uh, Vietnamese forces, it was any forces you could want.
So if you're, if you're a, a war planner, looking at that paragraph, you know everything's on the table now.
It's a reversal of Kennedy's from the very beginning, From Cuba in the beginning, all the way to Vietnam, no damn combat troops.
And so that's the last chapters here in my book, JFK in Vietnam, where we write about how this happened.
Now, so here's the bad news.
I told you about Kruelak and Upland 34A.
What happened during the last six weeks of Kennedy's life was in SAM 63, the withdrawal plan, from that moment up to the time he was assassinated.
General Taylor was actually working against Kennedy to gut the withdrawal plan behind McNamara's back, didn't tell McNamara what he was doing, gutting the withdrawal plan, and at the same time, standing up up plan 34A at the same time.
Also, of course, behind McNamara's back and Kennedy's back.
Now, if you have to ask yourself a serious question there, why would he be doing that?
Why did he tell the truth only 24 hours before the president's death?
So what I'm trying to tell you is that is the pièce de résistance of what I saw him do.
When he came back and gave Kennedy the thing he didn't want to hear back in '61, you know, with his combat troops under flood relief task force, all this stuff, he was new.
He had to know.
He had to know what he was doing.
And everything was ready.
Everything was finally ready.
Now, one thing I didn't mention that I now need to mention that dovetails.
With what is happening here in this six weeks is something that happened after the Bay of Pigs and actually just around the time that Taylor was brought in to the investigation group of the Bay of Pigs.
Okay?
There is a subcommittee of the National Security Council called the NES, the National, it's the Net Evaluation Subcommittee.
of the National Security Council.
And it's all military guys, including but one, the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles.
And they do something called a PSYOP.
I think I told you at dinner last night, I can say what that is.
Strategic Integrated Operation for Nuclear Warfare.
Not a psychological operation, the other kind of PSYOP.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what?
It's a plan for nuclear warfare that is briefed to the president every year for the next fiscal year.
It's a prediction.
Okay.
And Eisenhower was the first one to get one.
And this is when he's increasing nuclear weapons to save money.
And but he sees they tell him what's going to happen, even though uh we have a lot of weapons and all that.
He was absolutely stunned, Eisenhower was president when he saw how many American casualties and casualties around the world were going to be right.
And so he did not want to do that, and he would never have done that.
But in any event, that was the first psyop.
Um, and then Kennedy becomes president, and so in the beginning or the end or not the beginning, the middle of the first year was in 61.
And instead of giving in the PSYOP for 62, they did something different.
And of course, the background is what happened at the Bay of Pigs and everything.
And Kennedy had to go on TV and say it was my mistake.
And he did.
He took responsibility.
He was kind of at his nadir because Khrushchev was kicking his ass in Vienna, saying terrible things about war.
And so the Vienna conference didn't go good, and the Bay of Pigs hadn't gone good.
This was kind of a low point for Kennedy.
And so they sit down and they brief him on not the 62 PSYOP, but a PSYOP for the fall of 1963.
And so what they do is they tell the president that that's a special time that we could, and they were recommending a surprise total nuclear attack against Russia, China, all that stuff, in the fall of 1963, because that was the opportune moment.
Before the Soviet Union would have to start bringing online ICBMs and we would be at our maximum power and the maximum advantage on both sides when you compare the nuclear power.
That's what they briefed him on.
So he gets up and he says, I don't want to hear any of this kind of talk again.
And he's walking through the door on his way.
You hear him say, and we call ourselves the human race.
That was his reaction to the PSYOP that they were talking about.
There were other PSYOPs along the way, but that was a.
Here's the importance of that.
And what I'm interested in is knowing who all was there.
When did this meeting take place again?
July 1961.
Okay.
The plan was for 63 in the fall.
Yeah.
The fall of 63 to do this surprise, spasmodic, Throw everything in the kitchen sink all at once.
Now, the point I want to make here is that idea wasn't dead in the fall of 63.
We have what I just told you shows you it was alive and well in 1963.
Right.
Okay.
NSAM 263 and the first version of 273 were being replaced, you know, by a PSYOP.
Now, the question is how many people in the CIA knew about this?
Because we've got a whole new Oswald thing unfolding at this time, all through the summer of 63.
And in the fall, when he ends up out there in Mexico City, and we have another record, you know.
Can we jump to him real quick and explain what was going down with Oswald in 63?
Well, Oswald is on his way.
He's got, you don't actually need a visa to get into Mexico, but you get in line and you get a piece of paper.
How long had he been back in the U.S. from Russia?
He got off the boat in the 2nd of June, 1962, when everything was a mess in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Now we are in 1963.
Oswald's Route Through Cuba00:15:08
He's been there the whole year establishing his.
Castro legend.
It starts in January when he puts a placard around his neck.
It says, Viva Fidel.
Right.
That's when you know it's game on because he's already been a commie in the Soviet Union.
And now, you know, he's going to wear the Castro badge as well.
Remember?
Castro and the KGB and Oswald?
Yep.
Okay.
So here we have him now in Mexico City.
Now, his story when he gets there, and I have reason to believe he was there, but he was also impersonated.
That's another whole story that people want to talk about and argue about, but I think it's very simple.
Anyway, what he is doing is he goes his first day to the Cuban consulate and says, I need a visa from you to go.
To Cuba because I'm going to go through Cuba and go back to Moscow again.
I want to go back there and I'm redefected.
He wanted to redefect.
He told this is the Cubans that he wanted to redefect again to the communist side.
He wanted to go over to Russia again.
Now, and you have to understand that this is about the time of this is not even, this is October.
This is the first week of October.
Right.
Actually, the day that he went to the Cuban consulate, I think it was probably technically something like 30 September.
And so didn't he meet with the head of assassinations there?
Well, that's the Russians.
I'm getting there.
But he starts with the Cuban consulate.
What she says to him is, look, where's your Russian visa?
We can't give you a transit visa if you don't have the Russian one.
And besides which, you don't even have any pictures with you.
So he has to go to a booth and take pictures of himself.
And then he goes over to the Russian embassy.
And yes, one of the consular officials, one of the two consular officials, is Valery Kostikov.
They're all consular officials.
He just so happens to be the KGB head of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere Division.
And that was what he was supposed to be doing.
They wanted to make sure that he has contact with Kostikov.
Who told him to do this stuff?
Who told him to do the stuff in the first place to go over to Moscow?
His handlers.
He had handlers who told that you need to get the story first, and then we can maybe draw straws as to who and how many people.
Very few people are in on this.
And this is not Sully.
This is not Sully.
No, this is another, but it's the same thing.
They learned about it, they understood what happened, whoever was behind it.
And just let me play this out with you.
So, what happens is the Cuban, excuse me, the Russians.
The Soviets tell him, Look, you're an American.
We can't give you a visa here.
The only place you can get a visa from is your embassy in the United States in Washington.
So I'm sorry.
So then he goes back to Duran, Sylvia Duran, and the Cuban consul, and says, Yeah, they agreed to give me my visa.
She said, Really?
She talks to Kostikov every day because she picks up the phone, calls Kostikov, and says, I got this guy here who says you did that.
And he's, No, that didn't happen.
He's a kooky guy, you know?
And so she said, Nah, you're busted.
We're not doing that.
Okay.
And so he's out of bullets for that Friday.
So he goes back on Saturday and tries again with the Russians.
And all of this is reality, this part of it.
So he really has no business going there because the embassies and consulates are closed on Saturdays.
Well, it just turns out that on Saturday mornings, the Russian consulate guys have a volleyball game.
And so they're all there showing up in their shorts and stuff.
And the guard says, you know, buzzes them and says, there's this guy Oswald out here wants to talk to you.
And he says, well, they let him in.
And so they go through it again.
And he puts a revolver on the table and says, see what the FBI does to me.
You know, they won't help me.
So he's saying he wants to go back to Russia so bad and he can't get any help, you know, from the Americans.
And he, you know, what was me?
What can I do?
So they said, okay, here's what we're going to do we're going to send a message to Washington that you need to fill out to request a visa.
And then they can send it to you here from Washington.
How about that?
He just pushes the paperwork away.
and walks out.
That is the end of reality.
Now becomes Hollywood, what I want to say, fun and games.
Phone calls start to be made.
And somebody calls up and starts asking for documentation and says, has the reply come back yet from Washington for me?
Now, the problem with that is there was nothing sent to Washington in the first place.
Oswald didn't fill it out and didn't care.
Right.
So you have to understand how that's possible.
And so there's a lot of people who just swear that there was an imposter there, not Oswald.
Calling and asking about it.
Yeah, just basically, Oswald didn't go there.
There was an imposter that went down there.
Oh, okay.
So now I have something better because I had, when I wrote whatever book we're talking about here, The CIA was able to actually interview the Russians and the Cubans that were there.
They agreed to go to do a deposition of everything they remembered that happened in their consulate, if it was Cuba, the embassy, if it was Russian.
And the fact of the matter is that it was obvious whoever was on the phone, there were more phone calls that were made, there were three of them.
But at every point, it didn't jibe with what we know happened inside the consulate and the embassy.
So that gave me the clue and actually the answer.
Oswald failed in his job to get the visas.
He wasn't really going to go anywhere, but the CIA had a lot of Cubana airline pilots that were on the take that as long as he got the visa, they could say he had been in Cuba.
And there was already stuff in the mail coming from a guy in Cuba saying, hi, Lee, it was great seeing you here, and all that.
So all this stuff was in motion.
Right?
And of course, he never got the visa, so he was in trouble.
They sent him there to tie himself to Castro and again to remind everybody that he was KGB too.
Right?
That's what he did.
Now, I have to tell you, here we have, we're just weeks away from the motorcade, and the first thing that the FBI has to do for a motorcade is to know everybody who works on that.
On that trip, not a trip.
The route.
On the route, exactly.
Anybody who is even questionable is removed physically from that route or the route is changed.
And so that's why Oswald wasn't taken off the parade route.
Everything was suppressed.
Everything he did down there was put in a different place until after the shots were fired.
Everything that he did.
In Mexico, meeting at the consulate and the embassy, all those documents.
The whole year, the whole shebang of playing, you know, what he did in Dallas, in New Orleans, and then in New Orleans, then back in Dallas again.
None of that stuff made it into his 201 file.
Why?
Because he would have been moved from the parade route.
Who made it so that those files were not available to anyone?
Good question.
Good question.
We know where they were filed.
I think I brought, I don't know, I have these cover sheets where it shows that who read this file or that file.
And it's very clear that they were not, he already had a 201 file.
It was opened in 1962, too late for a lot of reasons, but that's not the point here.
His 201 file had been opened for a long time.
And all the stuff he did in 1963 didn't go into it.
It was hidden in another place.
It's just like Sully having all the documents coming from all the other government agents being hidden at his desk.
So nobody could know what happened except for him.
So the same thing was going on, only this time the documents were sent to a place called the SAS.
And it's basically the Cuban affairs staff.
It's a huge staff now because of the Cuban problem.
And there's a guy by the name of Desmond Fitzgerald who has to know.
He's the head.
Of SAS and probably his deputy, but nobody else really knows that all these Hoover letterhead memorandums about everything Oswald was doing in New Orleans and stuff were not put into a one file.
So then you have a situation while he's down there, while Oswald is down there in Mexico City, Winscott, who is the head of the CIA station, has to ask a question because they don't know who he is.
So they send a cable to headquarters.
Who is a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald walking all around here?
Who is he?
What do you know about him?
Now, the guy who was in charge of the Mexico City desk was John Witten.
And the only thing they gave him to answer when Scott was down there in Mexico City was the 201 file.
They said, Oh, well, hell, the latest information we have is May 62.
Oswald was still in the Soviet Union then.
All his entire life had been expunged.
For the purposes of the communication going between headquarters and Mexico City.
So the lights didn't blink red in the CIA.
Now, over at the FBI, at the same time, somebody took Oswald off the espionage list, which started when he went to Moscow back in 1959.
Right.
Nobody could put anything in the Oswald file or read anything in the Oswald file.
Without getting permission from the espionage section of the FBI the whole time.
Until, while all the lights are turned off in the CIA, the same thing happens in the FBI.
He's taken off the espionage list.
So he's not on there for the crews that are supposed to remove people on the route or the motorcade.
Who could have done something like that?
Somebody who is very powerful, who's basically saying you're going to do this.
Now, how powerful?
Well, you have to have somebody pretty high in the CIA to do it.
This is a CIA.
It has to be CIA.
Well, the 201 file part, not the FBI part.
Right.
There's a lot of people that I could guess at, but it's not important right now.
I'm working on this.
And this is why I don't write my book yet, because I have plenty of time.
But I'm.
I'm very close to answering these exact questions.
Now, and it's not just the CIA.
It's the military who are actually taking Kennedy's plan and shit canning it and replacing it with an invasion plan.
You have to understand that's going on at the same time as this files caper.
So there's military people involved.
There's got to be somebody in the CIA who is a fireman.
So what they're doing is they've created the true.
Story of everything Oswald did is going to blow up like a virus that's going to balloon big time as soon as the shots ring out.
Now, for me, rather than try and identify every single human being, I want to know the nexus of the people in charge of this operation.
And then we can work it down from there.
Without telling, without understanding who's running the show, it's pretty difficult to say, okay, it has to be this guy or this guy.
Clearly, John Witten at the Mexico desk, that element was not involved.
Okay, they didn't see it.
Now, we have the records now, by the way.
Those same sheets, routing and record sheets, when you sign another government agency document in the CIA, it comes in with the document, but you have a routing sheet on the front, and everybody who reads it has to put their initials and the date that they saw it.
And so, down at the bottom, it shows where it was filed.
And everything should have been filed in this 201.
But it isn't.
It's 100 300 11.
That's the FPCC file over in SAS.
Putting the Oswald Story Together00:14:32
And then later, there's a line through it that was put through it after the Kennedy assassinated.
A line through it and put his 201 number in there.
You see the two numbers on all these.
Now, this House Select Committee asked for those routing and record sheets.
They wanted to see them.
And you know what happened?
The CIA said, no, you can't have them.
And this is our elected officials.
So it was.
In 2017, 2018.
And I even had another chance.
There was something, another few boxes that my friend Jay Harvey and I found some years before that when there were five brown boxes of stuff that was put up before the big release in 2017, 2018.
It was during the ARRB.
There was a small five boxes of stuff.
And there were some of those routing sheets there with a lot of blackouts.
But anyway, I got a hold of them later on.
And it was just devastating stuff.
So, what you have here is stuff going on involving, again, like I say, you've got a military, I think, a military coup, and they have their things that they have to do.
But then you have, before the assassination itself happening, what you have to do is have a plan for the cover up.
And that can't be made.
You can't.
Decide what your cover is going to be after the shooting.
It doesn't work that way.
It requires careful coordination and control of who knows it.
So, we're talking about military and civilian CIA, some people.
So, where am I starting my investigation for this?
I want to go back to where the idea started.
The idea started in July 1961, where the perfect time to do this big attack would be the fall of 1963.
And Kennedy had said, no.
Over and over and over again.
So, who was there?
Who was there?
And I got the list of names of the people that were sitting there.
And the name that popped out right away is a guy who just came on board for Kennedy.
His name was Maxwell Taylor.
He sat there and watched.
And he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the fall of 1963, putting in the plan that Kennedy didn't want and the one that the Chiefs had wanted back in 1961.
I want to not go too much farther in some of these things.
You were right about one thing.
There's a few things I'm still working on that I don't actually want to put on the table, but that's where I'm going.
I'm looking very carefully at who could have been in both places or could have had access to somebody in the CIA or the military who was then involved or in a position to do these types of things and hide things.
There was another defector who said that there were former U.S. presidents that were aware of the plan to assassinate Kennedy.
This is the story about the true Oswald story in Minsk.
So we had a lot of investigations, the Warren Commission, and then the Senate, and then the House of Representatives.
That was all over by the 70s.
But defections were still going on.
And a KGB defector came over to the CIA in 1981.
His name was Sergei Papushin.
It took me a while to figure that out.
The CIA tried to make it hard because they were told not to reveal the guy's name, but I have my ways of figuring things out.
A newspaper article and a few other things allowed me to put it together.
He told us the story.
Actually, there was a story about him from another guy.
Jirolev was his name, I guess.
He said that there were two conspirators with Oswald, two American presidents that had conspired with Oswald to kill President Kennedy.
Now, the problem with that was that, you know, the previous presidents, there was only Truman and Eisenhower because Kennedy was dead and everybody else before him was dead.
So, whatever two presidents were, those were the only two presidents they could be.
Right.
And that's crazy.
And so, and it was almost just throw it in the trash can, except for there was another couple of lines in this thing that mentioned, but there was a guy who defected who was bona fide, and his name was Sergey Papusin.
So then, this crazy memo of this guy who walked in, we think maybe in Canada, to get a CIA guy to tell this story to, there was another, there was a throwaway sentence at the bottom, and the ARB got it and looked at it, and it was a little guy.
Who really was nondescript?
I don't even remember his name.
He wasn't, but he wasn't in the hierarchy of it.
And so it went all the way up to the top.
And then they asked the CIA about it.
Well, the CIA actually, and you have to understand by this point, it's 1998.
Okay?
That's when the AARB is the last weeks, 1998, when they put the story together.
They figure out his, they get a CIA cryptonym.
IJ Decanter, and they get the FBI pseudonym, Flash Run, and I get all this stuff on those things, and they're the same guy.
I can see that.
And so you can put this guy's personality together, and there's the ballgame.
There were a lot of episodes in his history before he died, allegedly suicide by one fifth of liquor.
You know, under his bed.
He dies after doing that, and that's not very convincing.
And it was right after his handlers came to visit him, right?
Yep, that's right.
But in any event, the CIA forked over all this stuff, asked for the review board to not mention the name and not to do this or that, but they sent the whole big bunch of stuff that I used.
Interviews, tapes that you could hear talking, all this stuff they sent.
So we have plenty of stuff to work with, even the stuff that was released.
And the newspaper article was very helpful because it had the story.
Somebody had the story, but not the name.
And I put the story together with the other stuff I had, and it was easy to figure out his whole history.
But anyway, what he also told us led to the Oswald story in Minsk.
Because this guy had personal contact and knew those, he had visited.
The KGB school there later, and some of those teachers were still around, and they told him what they had talked to Oswald and everything.
So this came out, his defection was 81, but it wasn't until much later that all these pieces came together just before the ARRB closed shop.
So there were a lot of FBI files that were not collated with the CIA files and so on.
So it took a number of years for all this to happen.
But it was easy.
It was just so easy because I had all the information, and you could look at the chapter yourself.
You decide whether you like it or not.
And if you don't like it, that's your prerogative.
But it is one of these things that has multiple independent attestation, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The FBI files, the CIA files, everything fits together.
This guy was for real.
He was bona fide.
But eventually, something happened.
They didn't like something he was doing.
We have precious time.
Now we don't have to worry about that, but that's how I put that chapter together and how it was the last act of the ARB that was sitting wide in the open all this time.
And I finally decided to use it.
I hadn't used it in any of my books, and I decided because we were talking about Oswald over in Russia, I thought, well, it's time to put that in the book.
So, chapter three is Oswald in Minsk.
Now, the interesting thing is the guy who's written the most about this, his name is Titovitz, the people read his book.
He was there.
He knew Oswald.
He was a friend of Oswald's.
He doesn't say anything about any of this.
We're not really sure why that he wouldn't know any.
Is this the guy who was a roommate with him?
No, he wasn't a roommate, but he was a friend.
Okay.
And what was the significance of the two letters that he wrote back to CIA when he was trying to get back?
Was one that apparently never got there?
Yeah.
So it's important for a couple of reasons.
What it does, what happened with the two letters actually.
Allows us to see that there was a CIA penetration that was trying to be covered up.
And it looks like the House Select Committee actually cooperated.
So Oswald wrote a letter in 1960 at the time that his 201 file was being opened, by the way.
Anyway, he.
And that's what triggered the 201 opening, he had asked to.
He didn't ask to come home.
He asked the letter to ask the American consulate to give him his passport back so that he could go back to the United States.
And now, what happens is, then there's another letter in January that says, Hello, this is Oswald again.
You didn't answer my first letter that I sent asking to go back, whatever.
So.
He actually, that's the first line in his second letter.
His, you know, I sent you the first letter.
And so when the House Select Committee gets this, they go along with the CIA to say there was no first letter.
And they say everything that's in the second letter, but they leave the first line out, where Oswald says, My first letter.
The HSCA doesn't include that sentence.
So that tells me that somebody asked them to help protect a sensitive source, which would be how in the hell what happened to that letter, that first letter?
Right.
And it was pinched by the KGB.
And the problem is that later on, they didn't want anybody to know because that's when the 201 file was opened.
And there was another guy, other people behind that.
But anyway, I was able to put that story together.
And without knowing, which is something I found late enough to get it into, I believe, the Oswald and CIA book, which was 1995.
And if not then, in another one of my books, I think by then I'd already figured it out.
Because this is 95.
Okay, so the CIA, excuse me, the KGB falls apart by 91.
It's all over.
Not just the KGB, but the whole Soviet Union is gone.
And so there was a honeymoon period where both sides were talking to each other.
We gave them a lot of money to get rid of you know, weapons of, you know, toxins and things and suitcase nukes and things like that.
There was a lot of cooperation trying to get our arms around all the things that could be sold on the black market and things like that.
But also for the media, they had a field day.
They sent people over there and interviewing people.
It was all okay for a while.
Later on, Putin took care of everything.
But anyway, the point is that.
ABC News got in there, and it was Ted Koppel at 11 o'clock p.m.
I remember watching those shows back then.
Anyway, they were given access to the Oswald files, and the letter was in there.
There it was.
Just as big as day.
The letter was there.
And so there was no doubting about that first letter.
And so here's the other thing it told us, though, because his diary didn't have it.
And there's no way he wouldn't have put it in his diary.
So there are a lot of things wrong with that diary that we think, and that diary was made after his death.
We think they had a version, but they made another version because there were other things they wanted to cover up.
Some of the sources they may have had, sensitive sources, who knows what all was behind it.
But anyway, I told that story about the two letters.
And the first letter was sent at the time of the 201 opening in 1960.
And they didn't want anybody to know about that.
And so they used the State Department for some help and so on.
Anyway, there's a lot more details to it, but it's a fun story to tell because we know that somebody actually found the letter, the first letter that.
What did the first letter say?
The Big Martin Luther King Point00:02:18
I would like to come back to Moscow and get my passport from you.
Oh, okay.
Because I'm planning to, and I need help, and I need money.
He asked for money, too, to take his family back to the United States.
Anyway, it took a couple of years, not two years, but like a long time, 20 months before he actually got on the boat with his wife.
We were talking last night.
You said there were basically three main reasons that we're so far behind.
We're so far behind in analyzing everything that happened during the Cold War and everything that you're finding with Kennedy.
And one of the big points was about Martin Luther King.
It is 2023 now.
And still, I'm writing books like this that have these big stories.
And I'll get to the King story in a second, but that's just one of them.
And all of this stuff was available back in 2017 and some of it even before then.
But.
Certainly by 2017, 2018, there are 6 million pieces of paper.
Now, there are so many people who call themselves researchers who don't do research, but they do read other people's books.
Now, it doesn't take very much research before we have a book that is going around the table from one guy to the next guy to the next guy to the next guy, and it never goes anyplace else.
So, we never make very much progress if the vast majority of people who are getting into the Kennedy assassination are just reading other people's books and regurgitating the same stuff.
So, these are examples that, like, for example, this Oswald story we just told about in Minsk that was there the whole time.
The MLK story is a big one.
And I broke that story in Memphis this year on the 55th anniversary of his assassination down there.
Breaking the MLK Assassination Story00:07:59
And we had a meeting down there.
We got put in a basement.
They took away a good room from us and gave us another one because I guess there was, I don't know why it happened.
Anyway, it was very hot there.
But anyway, I gave that presentation and it was brand new.
And I mentioned some things that had never been mentioned before.
The only thing I didn't give up was the name of the person that was working with the CIA for the CIA as a mole in Martin Luther King's inner circle.
And I didn't mention the name of his case officer in the CIA.
Originally, it had gone back all the way to basically, in the 1930s, even before World War II, initially there were a lot of communist parties in the West that were basically communist parties only because they were anti fascists.
So the communists were part of that, they were against fascism.
And before World War II, along the run up to World War II, there was a pact.
That Stalin and Hitler made together, the Nazi Soviet pact.
And this allowed the Russians to go off to do their thing in the Far East with the nationalists versus the communists over there and gave Hitler plenty of room to go take Europe.
But the moment that that thing was public, the people were, the communist parties in the West were running for cover.
They all left the communist parties because.
Of the Nazi Soviet pact because of Hitler.
And so there was this one guy who was an opportunist.
He was a high school dropout.
And he had joined the Communist Party too.
And he was, he liked money and he liked to get his hands on it.
Anyway, he ended up being high up in the whole monetary structure of the Communist Party and the American Communist Party.
And also, specifically, he was head of the Chicago funding of the Communist Party up there.
So when the Nazi Soviet PAC.
Occurred, he takes off.
He steals all the money for the Chicago section of the ACP, American Communist Party, and takes off to Mexico with it.
Now, the CIA doesn't exist back then.
It's all FBI, and the FBI has a place down there.
And the FBI catches him with all this stolen money.
And so, the short story here is he's given a choice.
Jail or you spy for us in civil liberties groups or civilian civil rights, and so um, very soon after that you you end up with with World War Ii and there's a lot of things going on where the CIA eventually becomes the CIA.
But there's even, you know, there's stuff going on during World War Ii, wild Bill Donovan and and all the these groups that are are sent in uh, to the the war, British and Americans, not just American.
So where we end up is that this guy that I'm talking about now ends up working for the FBI in Washington.
Okay.
And he's had, by this time, he's looking for people that are in King's inner circle.
One guy's name is Stanley Levison.
And Stanley Levison had been a communist who was no longer a communist, and he joined Martin Luther King shortly after the bus boycott began.
And he was a very capable lawyer, a very big help to King.
And then there was another guy who helped him.
His name is Harry Belafonte.
And he brought not just money, but a lot of prestige to it.
And he was another guy who helped King out a lot.
Now, this mole ended up wiggling his way into both of their lives.
And he made a company with Leveson, and he kept all the money.
And then there ended up being a fight between them.
And Leveson got his money back from this guy, this con artist, but under the condition that he never talk about it to anybody, that they made the deal.
So pretty soon, Leveson's wife.
Ex wife ends up marrying the con artist.
She's a psychotherapy.
That's what she does.
She has the degrees and everything.
She does mind stuff.
Yeah.
And so he has some needs for some help with that.
And so he picks her.
They.
They find a way to get him during one of his presentations, and, you know, because he's a very famous entertainer.
And so they show up at some events, and pretty soon he worms his way in.
And then she becomes his psychotherapist.
Harry Belafonte does.
Now, it's usually at the end of the day, and then there's drinks afterwards and all this kind of stuff.
And then he, I don't know whether he was under hypnosis or not.
If he was, he can't remember.
But what he does remember is that.
They were pumping him for names and stuff on African American civil rights people.
Lots of them.
And it really bugged the hell out of him.
And so he eventually decided he told one of his lawyers because what had happened was he wanted some money.
He had made a lot of money.
He wanted just, there was a black effort somewhere in Harlem.
He wanted some money back to use for that.
And the con guy said, no, no, no.
It's invested in.
Soybeans and stuff, and you know, it's making a good profit.
No, you can't do that.
So, um, he told his lawyer he wanted to uh just to confront uh, he wanted to confront this guy, and his lawyer said, No, don't do that.
Let me do an investigation.
Now, this guy was you don't argue with this guy, he was a longshoreman lawyer for the longshoremen, and those guys are not to be crossed.
And he came back with a real story.
The whole story I just told you is it came from this guy.
His name is Katz.
And they'd given him a nose job and everything to change his.
And this guy's heritage was Russian Romanian.
And so they turned him into an Irish Catholic.
High school dropout.
And so, yeah, he's involved.
The Longshoreman Lawyer's Real Story00:03:02
And so, but.
So, when he comes back, he tells Harry Belafonte this story.
Harry Belafonte says, Okay, let me handle this.
So, Katz shows up in the office.
The secretary's there and he says, Hello, Mr. X.
And he tells his real name.
And that name hasn't been used in years.
And uh-oh, he tells the secretary to leave the room.
And then Katz tells him what's going to happen: he's going to get all the money back or else.
So, they do this, but.
The con artist manages to get the same deal that Leveson had.
Can't tell anybody about it.
They got all his money back and then some.
So here you have, and they become, Leveson and Belafonte become some of the most important people in King's thing after, during, and after the bus boycott, which lasted a whole, almost two years.
Wow.
So, We fast forward here now to a time which is very important, actually, for students of the Kennedy assassination who know that John Kennedy, as I said, didn't want to pull out of Vietnam until after he was elected, and so he hadn't done very much.
But then he did.
He faced the music in the summer of 1963 because the bottom was falling out.
He needed to do it before, he needed to cast it in concrete before the whole possibility would be gone.
And he did the same thing on two other things.
On the 10th of June, he went to American University in Washington and delivered the commencement address.
And he made one of the most famous speeches ever.
Is this the speech about secret societies?
No, about detente.
Okay.
He told Khrushchev that he wanted to mend fences completely, would open up the space program for those guys and all this stuff.
You know how the generals felt about that?
So it was, yeah, it was all about detente and stopping this war, this Cold War and everything.
And he said, you know, if we have to fight, we're prepared, but we don't want to do that.
And it was such a great speech.
And people were kind of freaked out.
The students didn't know what to think about it because nobody had a speech beforehand.
But it was televised and you can watch it.
It was on 10 June.
Can you pull it up?
1963.
1963.
What's the name of the speech?
The Détente?
Well, that's what it was about.
But it's the American University commencement speech.
But the very next night on television, on live television he, it's a long speech he gives on civil rights and it's a, it's a real wing dinger.
I mean, he goes back and he says nothing has happened since Lincoln, you know, and so he's.
The Problem of Secrecy Itself00:11:12
He's confessing his own, you know, he's getting the courage of his convictions.
These are things he was going to do after he was elected, Civil Rights Bill and and a detente.
Why does he do it then?
He, he has to get do the Vietnam thing because he's got to get it in concrete before it's too late right, And he thinks he's got, he knows he's, that they're going to assassinate him somewhere.
We've had a Chicago plow, we've had a Mayan plow.
There was one in Tampa, right?
Right here.
Yeah.
So, so how, yeah, explain that real quick.
So, what I, what I'm, what I'm telling you is Kennedy is a, they were always afraid.
That's why they didn't clean house when they got in.
They were afraid of the military.
And so, my last book, when I get to it, when I eventually do what I've been asked to do by so many people, which is go ahead and just finish the damn.
Thing, you know, just give us the answer, would you?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, it's going to have a title.
I like this first one, Where Angels Tread Lightly.
That was like from a poet, a little bit different, but that was some June Cobb, who was a CIA infiltrator in Cuba, lucky to get out alive.
She used that.
So I thought it was cool.
And the rest of these things, Count on the Dark, Into the Storm, they're more tell you.
A little bit more about what's going on, but the title for my last book is going to be um, the watchman waketh in vain now, and the reason for that is because on the day Kennedy was assassinated, he was going to give a big speech at the at the Trademark.
The Trademark was basically a couple hundred yards past the, the overpass.
They were almost there, Okay, and his opening to that speech was from the Old Testament, Psalm 127.
Lest the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman waketh in vain.
Why would President Kennedy say that?
What does that even mean?
Okay, lest the Lord keepeth the city, unless God is protecting the city, yeah, the watchman can go up there all he wants, but it's not going to do any good.
The city is going to go.
There is no use of watching or doing anything if you don't have God's protection.
It's a prediction of his death, like the things that he did that summer, the things that he did with the withdrawal plan, the things that he did for civil rights, the things that he did for detente.
He wanted to get it out there before he died.
So all the good things that he did, and a lot of them were, would go down in history, and they would know that that's what he wanted to do.
How did that Psalm 127?
You can look it up, you can read it, and you can also find out that what I'm saying is true.
I probably have put a citation.
I put that in the end of the storm, by the way.
It's at the very, very end because I thought it was such a weird thing for him to do.
And then it finally got to me.
I figured that out what it was.
And he was assassinated right before he got a chance to read that Psalm.
And so the watchman did watch in vain.
For John Kennedy.
So that's going to be the title of volume seven.
What was the speech?
What did you make of the speech that he gave on secret societies?
When is this?
Can you search this one real quick?
It's pretty easy to find.
Just type in Kennedy's speech on secret societies.
For far greater public information.
Okay, let it roll for a second.
Second to the need for far greater official secrecy.
Here we go.
The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society.
And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies.
Yeah, but that's all he's saying is that since the rise of the national security state, we have all this secrecy.
Nobody knows what's going on anymore.
We are not a secret society.
We're not supposed to be, but that's what we're turning into.
That's what he's saying.
It's real simple.
It's not like.
But that's what we are now.
It's literally what we've become.
Yeah, but it's not like these.
You need to come closer.
It's not like these guys that are like, you know, doing seances and all that kind of stuff at all.
This is just what happened to us once, you know, we had to keep all these secrets.
Right.
And the press has a hard time because they don't know who to trust, right?
Right.
So that's why you say you got a difficult job.
We have all these secrets all the time.
It's crazy, though, that that's where we've come to today.
It was back then.
Oh, my gosh, it's even worse today than it was back then.
You made the great point that we wouldn't be sitting here today if it wasn't for Kennedy when it comes to the nuclear arms race and.
Us wanting to bomb everybody off the face of the earth.
But when it comes to this stuff, it's clearly gone off the rails to where we are today compared to back then and where we're going to, where are we headed?
A democratic society is based upon free access to everything our leaders are doing.
That's the way, that was what our founding fathers expected it to be.
And they would turn in their graves if they could find out what happened, you know, to.
How do you think, what's your opinion on.
How did this get so out of control with the media being so corrupted by government?
Well, that's another part of the same story.
First of all, it's just the problem of secrecy itself.
Right.
And, you know, there's a famous quote who will guard the guardians?
And the answer in the CIA is the Office of Security because nobody can investigate them, you know?
And so when, you know, secrets, are above anybody else, then you don't have a democracy.
That's for sure.
And that's the problem.
And so, if you actually decide that you want to manipulate public opinion, it's easy to do.
All you got to do is put a few of your stringers inside of the media.
So, it's easy.
And there's actually a long string of books and things that are done on this whole practice of actually using plants, CIA plants, inside the media.
Right.
Right.
And it's.
What are the names of those books?
Do you know off the top of your head the names of any of those books?
Heavens, no.
Okay.
But I mean, it's.
There are many books on that.
And what you want to do isn't so much books as you just need to go on to Google and start Googling.
That's another thing.
Google is completely compromised.
It is, but you can still find all these allegations of what's going on.
There's lots of articles, lots of.
You know, books and not just books, but what do you call them?
Things that pamphlets and things like that, and other maybe they're not even articles, maybe they're podcasts or maybe they're, you know, speeches and things that talk about this all the time.
What do you think about it?
Do you ever have this conversation with Oliver Stone?
Because I know he's had to deal with a lot of backlash.
I know he's had to deal with censorship, he's had to deal with defamatory people trying to smear him and discredit him, saying that he's anti American, conspiracy theorist.
Have you ever had that conversation with him?
No, no.
I actually, when he wants something where somebody who's been out in the field has experience, he'll call on me and ask me for some help.
But we don't correspond a lot.
He's gone down another path, and he's not really doing a whole lot on the Cold War anymore.
Although there are some things he's done recently.
I've seen one or two things on television about it, but no, I don't have a.
Basically, I get asked for information.
Right.
And I. What was your role on that latest film, JFK Revisited?
Oh, there were two different versions of it.
I was used, actually, I was interviewed twice.
They came to Washington and did their interviews for it.
And then after they went back to California, he flew me out there to do some more takes.
On it.
And so, I mean, that's.
And I told him what I knew.
Is there any particular question you have on what we talked about?
It was New Orleans, all these things we've talked about today, all these things.
And this is something that Stone likes to talk about.
It's Big Jim Garrison.
I was very nostalgic about that still to this day.
And he didn't, it helped his film and my book helped open the door, but he never walked through it.
For years and years, I sent him a lot of my books and he wasn't interested in that.
He was JFK'd out.
Who was?
Stone.
Stone.
Yeah, he had other movies he wanted to make and do other things.
And he did.
And he wanted to show that he's not a, you know, he has breadth and he does.
But he'll tell you a lot of things about Russia that he likes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he did those Putin interviews where he interviewed Putin.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, some of that doesn't look so good right now with the Ukraine.
Well, John, thank you so much for your time and explaining all this to me.
It's very, very enlightening.
Well, I appreciate the opportunity to come here, come out of my closet and talk publicly.
It's an honor to have you.
Tell people that are listening or watching where they can find your books.
Do you have a website?
How can people get in touch with you?
Sure.
JMN, JFK, actually, it's the other way around.
JFK, JMN, that's John Fitzgerald Kennedy, John Michael Lumen.com.