Dick Russell investigates the JFK assassination, detailing Richard Case Nagel's alleged CIA-KGB double agency and his suspicious 1995 death after being subpoenaed. The discussion highlights Philip Corso's theory of two Oswalds, J. Edgar Hoover's concerns about imposters, and Antonio Veciana's testimony linking David Atlee Phillips to the plot. Russell contrasts the discredited Warren Commission with the House Select Committee's conspiracy findings, connects Operation Northwoods to 9/11, and argues that a small core group orchestrated the event using patsy Oswald to prevent World War III. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Researching The Kennedy Assassination00:08:17
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
Today I have a very special show for you in my interview series on the JFK assassination.
It's an in depth discussion with best selling author Dick Russell.
Now, Dick wrote what many consider to be the definitive work on the JFK assassination The Man Who Knew Too Much, about his encounters with CIA triple agent Richard Case Nagel.
He's also co author of several volumes on American conspiracy with former Governor Jesse Ventura.
Now, today we're going to focus on Dick's fascinating experiences tracking down dangerous leads in the most notorious crime in political history.
If you were looking for answers in the JFK mystery, then look no further.
Here we go.
Dick Russell, Richard Case Niguel, Triple Agent, Double Cross.
And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
It's 50 years ago now, but I think once something of that magnitude happens and it's basically the truth is not told about it, that colors everything that has happened ever since.
Into the situation we've got today with the surveillance state that we live in post 9 11 and the NSA revelations, the four great leaders.
Starting with JFK, and they were all gunned down.
And with them, I think, went a lot of not just hopes, but chances.
Dick, it's great to have you here.
Of course, The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of my favorite books.
My first question for you on this is how you came to write about the JFK assassination in the first place.
Now, I know you started off writing for Sports Illustrated, doing a totally different kind of journalism, and then things changed.
Yeah, they sure did.
I started out.
With Sports Illustrated in New York in 1969 and 70, and then I resigned after actually not too long at the magazine because I wanted to experience other things, travel around, see the world.
And in 1975, I was freelancing in New York when I went out to San Diego at the request of the Village Voice to do a piece on Richard Popkin, the professor who had written a book called The Second Oswald.
And he was saying, announcing to the world that he had solved the Kennedy assassination.
I flew out there and spent some time with him.
And even though most of the media didn't take him seriously, I especially came to realize that one of his key people, Richard Case Miguel, was indeed very, very important and someone that I wanted to try to track down.
And this was the beginning of my interest.
And I spent the next two and a half years just working on the assassination.
I'd been 17 years old in high school when President Kennedy was assassinated in '63.
And I wasn't.
Particularly political at that time, but as the years went by, I became more so, and especially after I met Nagel and had a chance to, well, not necessarily solve, but certainly learn a great deal more about the great mystery of the century and the tragedy of that day, I got very involved.
Now, Dick, do we know how Popkin ran across Nagel in the first place?
Yes, it was through Bernard Fensterwald Jr., who was an attorney in Washington, D.C., and had represented James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King's accused assassin, James McCord.
The Watergate burglar who blew the whistle there on Nixon originally, and a number of other people.
And Fensterwald was representing Niguel in a court of claims lawsuit, a lawsuit where Niguel was trying to get a full disability retirement out of the U.S. military, and had hired Fensterwald and was sort of using this lawsuit as a way to tell the government look, you better give me what I want, or I'm going to reveal everything I know about what number 22nd, 1963.
So Popkin knew Fensterwald, and that's how he managed to get in touch with Niguel at that time.
Now, when you think back on your early interactions with Niguel and really the unusual relationship that you had with him, in a sense, the amount that he revealed to you and how it came about, even though I know he probably held some secrets back, how do you remember him now?
Yeah, well, first of all, the reason I took him seriously was that on September 20th, 1963, two months before the assassination, Niguel had walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas.
Asked a teller for $100 in American Express travelers' checks, turned around, fired two holes into the ceiling, walked outside, and intentionally got himself placed in federal custody.
Now, the FBI had seized that day from him a number of things, including two notebooks, only one of which ever surfaced again, and that was in the custody of Fensterwald under a Freedom of Information Act request.
And that notebook, which I saw, which Popkin had a copy of, contained remarkably similar listings to what had been in Oswald's notebook.
The Cuban embassy number in Mexico City, several other names of CIA people.
There was, let's see, what else?
I can't remember exactly, but there was enough there to convince me that, oh, the Fair Play for Cuba committee was what else?
So this convinced me that this was a guy worth tracking down if I could, and I had an address for him from Popkin in Manhattan Beach, California, just outside LA.
So I went there and knocked on that door one day.
With some reluctance.
Well, first, a man came to the door and sort of peered through it.
And I told him that I was a journalist.
I was researching the Kennedy assassination.
I was just very straight with him.
And I asked if I could talk to him.
And he said, Well, my kids are out bike riding.
OK, you can come in.
So he was always very cagey in the sense of there was only so much he would reveal.
But we developed a relationship.
I wouldn't call it a friendship, but certainly.
You know, an acquaintanceship and, you know, subject reporter relationship that went on for some years.
And I ended up getting a job out there in here in LA working for TV Guide magazine as a staff writer in the late 70s.
And Nagel by then had moved into LA.
And so we would meet periodically, like every six months or so, in these kind of dingy bars and have some drinks.
And he would, I'd ask him questions and he would tell me some more things.
And he would never let me tape him, but.
Although I should say that at one point in 1979, I believe, we were having a phone conversation one day and he said, A lot of people in Los Angeles know who Dick Russell is.
And I said, Oh, really?
I said, Well, I'm any danger.
And he said, Including some Cubans and Cuban exiles.
And he said, No, I would have told you if you were.
He said, But then he told me the story of how these two guys from the CIA had sat at the next table from us in this one bar we were in, I called the Rain Check, I believe it was.
And claimed to him that I had taped him, but worked so hard at trying to convince him that I was doing this illicitly that he didn't think they were telling the truth.
And I told him the truth.
I said, I never really wanted to sometimes, but I never did.
So we had this on again, off again relationship for a long time.
And I waited for years, 17 years, to write the book, the first book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, because I was hoping that he would one day decide to tell me everything, but he never did.
In those early meetings that you had with Miguel, was there a sense of danger in the air?
Could you tell that there were people around that were spying on you?
Or was it that kind of an atmosphere?
Oswald And The Missile Crisis00:12:42
Sometimes.
Certainly, I believe that night I did.
And probably other times too.
I mean, I know that, you know, I was being watched because of my relationship with him, and they knew I was a journalist and that I worked for TV Guide magazine, which was a big magazine.
And so, yeah, I mean, I didn't feel that my life was threatened.
Maybe it was, I don't know.
But, you know, I.
I definitely felt I was being, I knew one night I was being followed, shattered with a car behind me.
The book reads like a movie sometimes with the back and forth between you and Miguel.
And it's just fascinating and great journalism.
Now, just to paint a full picture of Nigel, he was a pivotal figure in the JFK story.
At that time, he was a CIA agent, and he was also being dangled as a double agent for the KGB.
Is that correct?
Either the KGB or the GRU, which was the Russian military intelligence arm.
I'm not sure which one it was.
He would never say for sure, although I presume it may have been the KGB.
I mean, they operated overseas, so did the GRU.
But yeah, Nagel was a double agent, put to work by the CIA in the summer of 62, right before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He was sent to Mexico City based on his previous contacts in Japan.
He had a history where he could connect up with Soviet intelligence there and what he described as a disinformation campaign at the time.
He was feeding them, I guess, false information about the missile crisis situation that was developing right then.
So, you know, for the next year almost, Niguel was given two assignments when he left Mexico City in the fall of 62 by the Russians.
And of course, he's reporting, I presume, all this time back to the CIA as well and the Western Hemisphere Division.
But those two assignments were number one, they'd gotten wind, the Russians that is, of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy by a group of Cuban exiles operating out of Mexico City initially, anti Castro Cubans.
And they wanted him to keep an eye on that.
And they also wanted him to keep an eye on a young guy who had defected to Russia, supposedly, and just returned to the United States and was living in Texas.
And that guy's name was Lee Harvey Oswald, completely independent at that time of any assassination plot against President Kennedy.
And he had run across Oswald earlier in his life in the military when he was stationed in Japan.
Yes.
They had what he described, what Nagel described as a casual but purposeful acquaintance in Japan.
How that related to Oswald's supposed defection or what exactly was going on, I don't know.
Nagel would never tell me.
He did talk about a colonel, a Soviet colonel named Nikolai Arashkin, who the CIA was trying to get to defect, and that Oswald was somehow involved in that operation while he was still a Marine at the Atsugi Naval Air Base there in Japan.
Well, now, how did Nagel portray Oswald and the role he was playing in the run up to the assassination?
What does he say about who Oswald really was?
He says that Oswald was involved.
Was brought into not until the summer of 63 by these two anti Castro Cubans who were posing as Castro agents.
They convinced Oswald that if he took part in some fashion in this plot against President Kennedy, because Castro's life had been threatened by the administration, by the CIA, this was retaliation, but that Oswald would be welcomed in Cuba as a revolutionary hero.
Now, Oswald, according to Nagel, Went along with this.
He seemed to be a Trotskyite leftist.
He had his own ties to the CIA and the FBI, but he was the necessary patsy, the necessary ingredient, because he lived in Russia.
He had ties to Castro's Cuba through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and so on.
Even if it was set up by the FBI, he had those ties on paper.
And so Miguel's assignment was then to either convince Oswald he was being set up.
That this was a phony deal, or to kill him in Mexico City in September of 63.
So, what happened then was rather than do this, rather than kill him, that is, Niguel sent a warning letter, a registered letter to J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, in September of 63, between the 13th and the 17th of September.
Then he also alerted his superiors at the CIA, including Desmond Fitzgerald, and walked into a bank after that and took himself out of the picture by getting himself arrested.
He presumed.
That the U.S. agencies would take some kind of action.
He said he gave enough information in his letter, morning letters, especially the one to Hoover, which I saw quoted from.
I never saw the original letter or a copy of the original letter that Nagel had.
But that letter certainly gave enough information to warrant the arrest of Oswald and these two Cuban exiles who used the code names Angel and Leopoldo.
Nagel would never tell me their real names.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, he obviously felt that that was too big a secret to let out.
Yeah, I think so.
And, you know, he was trying to stay alive, too.
He had, I mean, after he walked into the bank, he was tried twice, actually, and convicted twice for, quote, attempted bank robbery.
Well, there was no way, even the arresting police officer, Jim Bundren, said, you know, this guy wasn't trying to rob the bank.
But a couple curious things about his case, which also lend, I think, a lot of credibility to his story.
One is the.
Police officer, I interviewed him twice.
He was a very young cop at the time in El Paso on the force.
And he told me that I think three weeks before the assassination, November 4th of 63, that there was a preliminary hearing in Niguel's trial, for Niguel's trial.
And that Niguel looked at him and said, No, the cop, Bundren, looked at him and said, You didn't really try to rob that bank, did you?
And Nigel said, You're a pretty smart cop, aren't you?
And then Nigel said, Well, I'll just tell you this.
I'm very glad not to be in Dallas right now.
Wow.
So, the police officer, of course, remembered this and then told me this.
He'd lived with it for years and years, never talked about it.
That was one very strong piece of evidence supporting that Nigel was who he said he was, as much as he would say.
And the other interesting thing that happened was that in January of '64, before there was ever a jury selected or anything, A new judge was brought into Niguel's trial, bam, all overnight.
That judge's name was Homer Thornberry, who was a very close confidant and friend of Lyndon Johnson's.
In fact, he was in Texas when Johnson became president that day that Kennedy was assassinated.
And Thornberry immediately put a lid on anything that Niguel tried to bring up that would even hint at anything about the Kennedy assassination.
There was some interesting stuff, also, CIA people, it's on record, came to visit Niguel in jail.
And he served four and a half years for something that he never even set out to do.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
And then he gets out of prison in April of 68 and immediately shows up in East Germany.
Where, I mean, how does he even get a passport?
I mean, you know, he's.
That fall, a story appears in the Washington Post.
This guy was released at the border in a high level prisoner deal.
And it was Nigel, you know, but nothing was said about the bank incident in Texas, none of that.
It was just, here was this guy, a former military captain, you know, who had been held captive or held behind the then called Iron Curtain for, you know, four and a half months.
So what was going on?
I mean, the guy clearly was not just some flunky off the street, you know.
Absolutely.
Well, it's amazing because, you know, with his relationship to Oswald, he was sort of stalking him, keeping an eye on him in New Orleans then the summer before the assassination.
And then at a certain point, He has these orders to either convince Oswald to get away from these conspirators or to kill him.
And who's giving him the orders?
The Russians.
Okay.
That's what's really, at least it seems to be the Russians.
Okay.
The Russians, in this spy game, you don't really know who's who.
And Nigel later became very, during this period, very suspicious that his CIA case officer or somebody who was reporting to him, CIA, was actually a.
An agent for the Russians himself.
Things got very murky and confusing, but it seems that the Russians, for their own good reasons, I mean, one, they didn't want the assassination to be pinned falsely on them.
They had enough connections on this whole inside world that that could happen.
And they also had a relationship with Kennedy.
I mean, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was an agreement forged between Kennedy and Khrushchev to basically, you know, we could take our missiles out of Turkey.
Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba.
So, you know, the Russians had a pretty good thing going with Kennedy and vice versa.
And they were really striving for world peace.
And, you know, of course, Khrushchev didn't last much longer either.
I mean, he was deposed in the coup in the fall of 16.
So the hardliners kind of came in, you know.
But, yeah, apparently it was ironically not the Americans but the Russians who set out to try to prevent this from happening.
Well, the Russians had their own intelligence people who came across the assassination plot.
And they figured out that somehow Oswald was involved.
They send Miguel in there to talk him out of it, and they give him actually some information on the people who've been trying to draw him in.
They say, look, these aren't pro Castro people, they're actually anti Castro people.
Yeah, Miguel determined that himself.
I mean, he was shadowing these people, Oswald, as well as the anti Castro Cuban exiles, and reporting back to his superiors on both sides about two earlier plots to kill Kennedy.
Also in LA in June of 63 and in Miami in December of 62.
So neither of those involved Oswald.
Right.
Now, did Niguel say that he knew for certain that Oswald was involved in the third plot, or is there a possibility that Oswald was in there actually penetrating the assassination plans of this group?
A lot of people think that Oswald was his own operative.
I think he was his own operative.
He didn't really want anybody to know who he was working for.
You know, he was.
He was a strange dude, but young and very intelligent.
And so, you know, it's possible that he had his own game he was playing and he thought he was penetrating on behalf of maybe the U.S. agencies.
I don't know.
But also, there's a lot of evidence to indicate that Oswald was indeed, you know, in his heart or his mind, a sincere leftist.
We have a real left trail with Oswald, and then there's Guy Bannister and this whole David Ferry end of it, and that feels very right wing.
Yes, and Oswald was connected to those guys.
There's no doubt about it.
I mean, Nigel said that too, you know, that Ferry was involved with Oswald, so was Bannister.
So, you know, are we ever going to sort it out?
I doubt it.
I mean, Nigel's dead now.
So, you know, he was the key, I think, as far as I could tell, who had more pieces than anybody put together.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, actually, you feel in the conversations that you have with him that you're getting very close to what the truth of the matter was, which is fascinating because he was there, you know, before Oswald sort of took off and became the Patsy.
Right.
The Trunk And Review Board00:08:45
But one thing about Miguel, he came back, or you came back in conversation and contact with him around the time of the ARRB, and this is shortly before his death.
Can you tell me a little bit about that period of time?
How did you reconnect after all those years?
It was very, very strange.
I waited many years, as I said, to go ahead and publish The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was about more than Miguel.
It was all the people I'd interviewed and all the pieces I'd put together over the years about this.
So that book came out in 1992, and prior to that, I had tried very hard to kind of recontact Miguel and say, Hey, you know, I'm writing this book.
I'm finally going to do it.
Will you talk to me some more?
All I had was a P.O. box for him at that time.
So he never responded.
And then the next thing that happens is I guess a year and a half or two has gone by after the book came out, and one day I'm in my office and I get a phone call.
And I pick it up, and it's him.
And I go, Wow.
We start talking, and he the conversation picks up really as if no time has passed.
I mean, you know, he doesn't mention the book, he doesn't, and uh, and finally I say, Well, Dick, you do realize you do know that I've published this huge book that's mostly about you.
He says, No, I said, I had no idea.
Incredible, I said, Well, I wrote you all these letters and to tell you that I was doing this.
He said, He never received any of them, so clearly someone was still, you know, tampering with his mail.
Of course, I was still pretty surprised.
I mean, you know.
It was intercepted, yeah.
Yeah, and then, but nobody he even didn't know afterwards.
And he said, well, he said, you know, the friends I have wouldn't necessarily tell me or know anything about it.
A lot of them don't even speak English.
They speak, I don't know, Japanese or Spanish.
So, you know, at that point I said, well, could we, would you meet with me again?
And he said he would.
And then he didn't, and later said he was told not to contact me or not to meet with me when I was out in California.
So, the next thing that happens.
Do we know who told him that?
Pardon?
Do we know what agency told him that?
No.
Okay.
He didn't say, but I presume it was.
Probably all of them, yeah.
Yeah, we'll see.
I don't know.
But so, in 1995, then I was giving the paperback of the book, it had come out.
I was giving a lot of talks here and there, and I'd been in touch with the Assassination Records Review Board.
Yeah.
And I was trying to convince them, you know, this guy is worth paying attention to.
You should.
I'd always believed if Niguel was subpoenaed by an official government agency that he would probably talk if someone took him that seriously.
So it was one weekend, I guess it was toward the end of October of 95, and I was giving this talk in DC, and a couple review board people were there.
Unbeknownst to me, they then decided we are going to go after Niguel.
They sent a subpoena to him, to his PO box in Los Angeles, and the day That subpoena arrived in his mailbox, he was found dead in his house.
So, I get a call about this from Pete Noyes, who was a newscaster at KABC that I knew and had written a book on the assassination once.
He goes through the death records, he calls to tell me that this happened.
So, I was the one who had, I knew that Miguel and his son were estranged, that probably the son wouldn't know.
I didn't know the son very well, I just talked to him a couple times on the phone.
But I was the one who broke the news to his son, which was, you know, that was pretty awful.
Oh, yeah.
And so then his son, the review board flew immediately out to Los Angeles.
The police sealed off the house.
And the review board went in with his son and went through what was there, which wasn't a whole lot.
But there were keys to a series of foot lockers that he kept, Nagel kept in, I believe it was Tucson, Arizona.
And Nagel had always said that there was one trunk in particular.
The purple trunk that contained what everybody wanted to know about.
So the son flew to Tucson.
While the son was gone in Tucson, his apartment was broken into in San Diego and left a mess.
And when he got there, there was only one trunk missing, and that was the purple trunk.
So what happened, I believe to this day, that even though the autopsy that was done on Miguel indicated a heart attack by natural causes.
That people know how to induce heart attacks, and it's quite probable in my mind that somebody had him killed before he would potentially have talked to the Assassination Records Review Board.
And somebody also did away with the purple drunk and broke into his son's apartment.
And somebody is whoever, I don't know.
I mean, I could only speculate about that.
Well, it fits a pattern from earlier investigations where witnesses get bumped off before they are to testify.
You go through some of the more high level ones in there.
But one thing about Nagel before we move away from him, there's a recording that he did supposedly that kept him alive.
And that may be one of the things he was moving around in that trunk.
And can you tell us a little bit about what that recording would be all about?
Yeah.
Apparently, he said that late in August of 1963, he surreptitiously tape recorded a meeting, conversation among, I guess it was four or five people.
Talking about assassinating President Kennedy.
At that time, they were talking about the Washington, D.C., Baltimore area at the end of September.
And so, Nigel had this tape, and he called it one of his pieces of life insurance.
Jim Garrison, during his investigation, got very interested in Nigel and had an investigator go to interview him in prison in Springfield, Missouri, Penitentiary, the federal medical center there.
And as it turned out, this particular investigator was a double agent.
I mean, he was a former CIA guy.
He'd penetrated Garrison's staff.
He did manage to, his name was William R. Martin.
I never was able to find him.
But he did interview Nagel in prison.
All of his records that he gave to Garrison still exist.
And Nagel did tell him to look for this friend of his who had this tape.
And he would turn it over to Garrison.
But for whatever reason, that never happened.
And Miguel later indicated he backed out on it himself.
He didn't want that tape to surface because he knew if it did, he would be probably not with us much longer.
Yeah, too hot to handle.
Nagel is actually referenced in the JFK movie.
I know Fletcher Proudy is supposed to be Mr. X, but the actual meeting that took place with Garrison and Mr. X is based on Garrison meeting Nagel.
How did that go or how did that come about?
I know that Garrison investigation is 67.
In 1968.
Okay.
Garrison went to New York, and this was right after Niguel got out of prison.
And by the way, he was just suddenly let go.
I mean, he's suddenly free.
So it's April of 1968.
Garrison meets him in Central Park.
They walk around, talk, I think, for a couple of days.
Niguel would not implicate Clay Shaw because to him, Clay Shaw had nothing to do with it.
About that.
He never called, decided not to call Niguel as a witness.
Anyway, Garrison did write about Niguel in one of his books.
And Garrison told me, as did Fensterwald, the attorney, that they both felt that Niguel was, as of the mid 70s, when I interviewed Garrison a couple times, he said, Niguel's the most important living witness there is, if somebody could get him to tell everything he knows.
So it was right after that.
It was coming from him, that's really important.
The Second Oswald Theory00:16:03
Yeah, it was.
It was major.
And then Nigel ended up after that going to Europe and, as I mentioned earlier, being taken off a train in East Germany and held for four months, probably not just in East Germany but in Russia, the Soviet Union.
Okay, so they wanted to know had he sort of double crossed them maybe in this whole scenario?
They wanted to know.
They wanted to know what he knew.
And he told me that he had actually handwritten a quote confession, you know, telling everything to the Soviets.
Of why he did what he did, why he walked into the bank, what his choices were in that period in September of '63.
So, I don't know if you want me to tell this whole story, but I went to the KGB in '91.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, definitely.
I was in, it's a long story, and I won't tell the whole thing, but in my second book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, I wrote a chapter about this.
Right.
But I was in, this is before the coup, while Gorbachev was still in power in '91.
Yeah.
The first grassroots USSR environmental conference was being held, and I was an environmental writer by this time.
Oh, yeah.
And so I wanted to cover it for a magazine.
And while I was there, I figured, yeah, what the hell?
Let me give it a shot.
So without going into all the details, I did get in to KGBA, get translated, and it was quite an experience.
They said they would get back to me in the US and said they would look for the Look for this stuff.
Of course, you know, it never happened.
I didn't really expect it to.
My approach to them was, you know, look, hey, the relations are better between our countries.
You know, maybe you'd come off looking pretty good if you were the ones that tried to save President Kennedy's life.
But, you know, hey, the KGB is the KGB.
That's a great angle, though.
It was a worthy effort.
It was a fun story to tell later, too.
One thing I find fascinating is that Miguel talked about someone named Leon Oswald, who was in the New Orleans period with Oswald.
Shadowing him, pretending to be him, doing this Oswald impersonation.
Did he go any further with that?
Not much.
He just said there was a second Oswald who used the name Leon.
One thing he did indicate was that this second Oswald was killed, murdered by mistake.
In other words, maybe somebody who thought it was Lee Harvey Oswald around the 19th of September 63.
That's so different.
Maybe after Niguel didn't do it, somebody else went ahead and did it, thinking that they got the wrong guy.
Well, now that's intriguing because we have the anti Castro leader, Sylvia Odio, who said that the people who visited her with Oswald introduced him as Leon Oswald there also.
So, we have a lot of this name shifting with Oswald in his military records.
You go into that quite a bit.
You refer to the possibility of a second Oswald, not just someone impersonating him, but someone who actually was groomed from a very young age to be an Oswald double, follow in his footsteps throughout his life, create these conflicting accounts.
I mean, I did write about it in my second book.
And John Armstrong, yeah.
Strong has developed amazing material about this, I think.
And yeah, that indicates, and it certainly is known that the whole double idea operation was used by intelligence services of both the US and the Russians, and that it could sometimes have begun when someone was very young.
In other words, they're grooming these kids for certain roles, and they look alike, and look alikes have a lot of uses in the intelligence world.
So, yeah, I mean, and I made some calls too when I was in touch with Don Armstrong in the mid 90s.
I mean, you know, I called the principal of Stripling Junior High, where one of the Oswalds went.
And he told me that the day of the assassination, the FBI swept down on the junior high and demanded everything, demanded to have anything they had on Oswald.
And it was so sudden that he was kind of taken aback by it.
You know, why is that the first thing anybody wants?
This is junior high, right?
Junior high.
Is this evidence of.
And kind of cover up with pictures and so on of, you know, a double Oswald.
I mean, it seems that way.
Yeah.
But John's book, Harvey and Lee, goes into this in great detail for any of your listeners who are interested.
That is a fascinating book, and I do recommend it.
I think it's very interesting because there is this evidence after he was killed that even the Secret Service were confused about his identity and were trying to track down.
And at some point, you mentioned.
In your book, that in 64, the original idea of exhuming him came up in 64, even though it happened many years later.
Yeah, it did, because they weren't sure.
Was there a Harvey Oswald?
Was there a Lee Oswald?
Were there two of them?
Also, there was the Heidel name, of course, which was the alias that was used on Oswald's selective service card.
Yeah.
Well, that was another really amazing thing in the Niguel story, was that, excuse me, going through the Fenster World files one day, I came across this card.
Which was an Oswald ID card that was somehow Nagel had.
And it had never before appeared in public.
And it was a uniformed services military identification card with a different photograph and a different picture, excuse me, a different photograph and a different signature than the card that was known to exist, which was only seen one time.
It was in a book by Judy Bonner called, I forget the name, but it came out in 64.
And that card, the card in the book, had a Department of Defense overstamp on it.
But Niguel's did not.
So, you know, obviously he's connected to Oswald somehow in order to get a copy of a card with no overstamp.
Was the picture of Oswald?
I know you reproduce the picture in your book, and that is a fascinating card.
It's hard to see exactly what it would be, but you get pretty much a rough idea.
It's a poor photocopy that I had.
So, you know, yeah, it looks like Oswald or one of the two Oswalds.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you think it's possible that Niguel was identifying himself as Oswald?
No, I don't believe so, but I think he was identifying himself.
What he told me about the Heidel alias, H-I-E-L-L, all he would say was that a lot of people were using the name Heidel.
Piece of paper, one thing that he submitted to his attorney Fenstowald at one point, he listed Heidel as one of his own aliases.
So, what that meant, I don't know.
I mean, once I raised the possibility with him that I might have figured it out, which was that HID, the first part of it, those were the initials for the South Korean intelligence agency, the predecessor of the South Korean CIA, for whom Nagel had worked or been involved with in the mid 50s in Japan.
I said, an ELL.
Well, those are the last three letters of your own name.
Well, he kind of blanched when I said that and refused to make any comment.
That's great.
That's great.
Well, it's always more interesting when they don't say something right.
You know that something's up.
I have to say that it seems like he was trying to tell you something about Oswald without actually saying it all the whole time.
That's the impression I get in your meetings that he's telling you enough, but But he's holding that little piece back that will get him knocked off.
But in your own work on Oswald, how do you see Oswald now that you've gone through all the research, you've had these experiences?
You've had so many up close experiences with people who met him and lived with him, worked with him.
What is your opinion of Lee Harvey Oswald and the way he's portrayed as the lone assassin, of course, in popular culture?
But you've researched it.
How do you actually see who this man was?
Well, I certainly don't believe he was the lone assassin, and I don't even know if he fired a shot.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence that he didn't.
But was he cognizant of something like this going on?
Yeah, I think he was.
I mean, they didn't just pick some guy off the street.
This guy was deeply involved with various spooks, spies, and he liked that world a lot.
I think he is and remains one of history's greatest enigmas.
He's 23 years old, and look at all he had.
Done in his life, you know, from the time he was a kid, and all these associations he had on both sides.
I mean, I think he was the perfect Patsy.
I mean, they needed him to pin it all on in order to, number one, you know, do the cover up.
I mean, I don't think the Warren Commission, with the exception of somebody like Alan Dulles, who was a pretty evil guy, but certainly not Earl Warren and Richard Russell and some of the other people on the Warren Commission, I mean, you know, they weren't doing this because they were covering up what they.
For some various reasons, I think they were sincerely trying to keep us out of World War III.
I think they had been told that if this is pursued, we're going to find out that Oswald had these direct ties to Castro and the Cubans, and before that to the Russians, and that they were involved in assassinating our president.
What are we going to do?
We're going to have to go to war.
So I think everybody had their own reasons for ducking and covering, as we called it in those days.
Did you come to any conclusions about Ruby and if Ruby knew Oswald?
You know, I didn't investigate that side of it too deeply.
But yeah, I think that it's quite likely we'll be New Oswald from stuff that's come out in recent years.
I did a third book with former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura last year.
I've done five books with him.
They killed our president.
Yeah, and that was a summation, really, of the best evidence 63 reasons to believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.
And so that really delved into all of those things.
And there was another guy helping us with the research.
So I think from what we saw in that, it wasn't new evidence that was uncovered, but stuff that's been around for a while.
Yeah, there's a lot of people who say that Ruby and Oswald were acquainted.
So I certainly don't rule it out.
I mean, I don't know if we can prove it.
There's no pictures or anything, but pretty likely.
Right, right, absolutely.
It seems like Ruby had to have some deep insider ability to be chosen to shoot him.
Because, and there are so many interesting mafia things about Jack Ruby.
And, you know, you have all these people.
There's a major picture coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio, which is going to try to say that the mafia was involved and that Marcello did it, etc.
And we know that in the House Assassination Committee on Assassinations in the 70s, they did come to a lot of conclusions about the mob being involved.
But it always seems to be one step below the actual information.
At least that's the impression I get.
And I got some of that from reading your book, too.
It seems like that's almost like the excuse, the default excuse they would go to if their own major story unraveled.
The mafia would be next in line.
Could well be.
I mean, I do think there was peripheral involvement.
I mean, they hated Chen.
Marcello certainly did, and he had the wherewithal to hire hit people.
Maybe he did.
And I think they certainly sent Ruby in.
But I don't think the mob was.
The mob didn't have the wherewithal, they didn't have the ability to cover this up to the extent that it.
It was.
The Warren Commission covered it up for their own, you know, quote, good reasons.
Sure.
But, you know, yeah, I think there was probably peripheral mafia involvement.
Miguel said there wasn't, but, you know, he could have been, he knew some of those people.
He could have been covering their ass.
I don't know.
But, you know, certainly there's a lot of evidence of mafia involvement, but I don't think that's the top level that we're talking about here.
Well, your writing about Miguel sort of inspired a lot of people to come out of the woodwork and talk to you.
And you tell this fabulous story about getting a message from Marina Oswald.
And can you tell us a little bit about talking to her?
Now, she was the wife of Oswald, of course, and his widow.
And she's always been a curious figure in the case because, of course, early on, she said so many things that seemed to incriminate him.
But, of course, there's everyone saying that she was basically influenced.
But how was your interaction and conversations with her?
What did she tell you?
Well, I don't think she told me anything startlingly new except.
The fact that she was really severely badly treated by the FBI and her quote captors after the assassination.
I mean, she said she was a walking zombie.
I mean, that she just didn't know which end was up and she was taken advantage of in a number of ways.
I think she, I mean, here was this girl, she barely spoke English and her husband's accused of killing the president and he's dead and is she going to get deported?
What's going to happen?
She's got two kids.
I think, though, that.
That over the years, as more and more information came out about what really may have happened that day, she switched.
I mean, she came to believe that Lee, her husband, was innocent, and she really devoted herself for a period of time to getting out there and talking about that.
And she came to, I had a, in 1993, after my book came out, I organized this meeting, gathering at my house in Boston at the time.
And Marina agreed to come.
It was the 30th anniversary of the assassination.
And Marina and I, and a bunch of really good lawyers, Daniel Ellsberg showed up that day too.
We talked for a long, long time.
Was there any way that anybody, any of these legal minds, could think of?
And she was pretty desperate that could get the case reopened.
And, you know, nobody could do it.
I mean, everybody was stumped after all this time as to how you would go about that unless you did something in the state of Texas and that was going to be awfully hard to do.
So I kind of lost touch with Marina by the couple years after that.
But I had a great deal of respect for her.
I thought that.
Given everything she'd been through, and that she was still, you know, really trying to get the truth out about this.
And she was quite a remarkable human being, as far as I was concerned.
She told you a very interesting story about at some period, very shortly after the assassination, she was taken to an H.L. Hunt's office, who was the oil baron, so an oil millionaire.
What did you make of that?
That's an unusual story because you have to think about the Hunts and their.
You know, supposed involvement, like, why would they be taking her there?
Exactly.
And she didn't know either.
I mean, she just said somebody came and picked her up, and this was, I don't know, within a few months after the assassination, drove her to this rich oil man's building where they just wanted to look at her.
Operation Northwoods Origins00:14:48
You know, nothing was even, I don't recall, as I recall, you know, there was no engagement of conversation or anything.
But she was baffled by it.
And, you know, and I always suspected that the Hunts or someone along, Those lines, you know, was involved in this.
So, yeah, there was a lot of enmity against Kennedy for wanting to cut the oil depletion allowance that was keeping them, helping keep them afloat.
Hunt was a fervent right winger, H.L. Hunt, the old man.
So was his son, Nelson Bunker Hunt.
And so, you know, in the first, in the man who knew too much, I tracked things, brought a new name into this that I couldn't prove it, but I.
I had the suspicion that General Charles Willoughby, who worked a lot with Cuban exile groups and had been Douglas MacArthur's chief of staff in the Korean War and was a rabid right wing nut, may have been able to pull enough strings to make this happen.
Well, when you were a journalist at the Village Voice, someone came out of the woodwork and sort of nudged you towards Willoughby, almost saying, Look, if you go after this, you'll get what you're looking for.
Sure did.
It was an anonymous letter that I received.
And it wasn't handwritten, it was like somebody cut letters out of the newspaper and put them down.
Like a ransom note.
Yeah, and the letter came to the voice and it said, I can't recall exactly at this moment, but it was something like Your Canadian computers, they were barely computers in those days, traced the mastermind of the assassination to a man named Sheppey Wiedenbach.
German, right?
Born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1893, the man who could do no wrong in American history?
The hinting about mind control operations and stuff.
Well, and the letter was signed, not signed, but blocked, lettered off, the Brooklyn waiter, I'm waiting.
And I was told to put an ad in the Village Voice in the classified section that said that.
And that this would get in touch with me.
Well, to my regret today, I didn't do it.
I just kind of thought, what's this?
Yeah.
So I never did it.
And then some years went by and I discovered that Adolf Sheppey Wiedenbach was the original name before he emigrated.
His family came to, United States of Charles Willoughby.
And so I started looking into, I got some of his papers from the Willoughby archive in, I don't know, DC somewhere, and started looking into his background.
And there was a lot of very intriguing stuff that pointed to the possibility that he could have been somebody, you know, really to take a look at with this.
And, you know, nobody had ever done that before or since, as far as I know, but there's ground there to cover, perhaps.
He's long dead, of course.
Yeah.
You do hear about this Torbitt document.
Which is one of these early releases, underground releases of JFK assassination information that came out and was circulated researcher to researcher.
And there's a lot of hints of post Nazi War International groups that were involved, that were connected with NASA, that somehow were involved in the assassination.
And it seems pretty far out when people hear, oh, there's Nazis involved, you know, the Nazis were defeated in 1945.
How is that viable?
Yeah, I don't know how viable the document itself is.
I've read it.
I read it when it was being circulated in the mid 70s.
I was very excited about it at first, but then I came to think, well, just too many names.
There's too many people that are cited as being involved in this.
Somebody would have talked about this.
Couldn't have, everybody.
But I think there were clues in it or there were glimmers of truth.
I mean, certainly after World War II ended, US intelligence did.
Bring over a lot of the members of Reinhard Galen's Nazi splendor, put them to work for us.
And so that's a documented fact.
And people like Otto Skorzeny and a lot of the war criminals were people that had survived the war, ended up being protected by American intelligence.
And people like Willoughby were in very close alliance with those kind of folks, close touch with them.
So, you know, quien sabe, I don't know.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
When you had a very interesting interaction with a gentleman named Philip Corso, who was retired military intelligence, and he became famous a few years after your interaction for other reasons.
He went into a whole different area and revealed all kinds of different things.
But this is interesting that people don't associate him with the JFK assassination.
What did he tell you?
He had worked as an investigator for Senator Russell, who was on the Moran.
Richard Russell, yeah.
Yeah.
And.
So he had been gathering whatever material information he could find and reporting to Russell.
And Russell, by the way, was one of the main guys on the Warren Commission who came out and he wouldn't sign the report.
He said, you know, there was a conspiracy, basically, and that's all he would say.
But Corso was talking to him about this whole double Oswald thing that there had been, and he, of course, told me this too that there had been two Oswalds and one of them went into Russia and a different one came back to the United States.
And they were lookalikes.
So again, you had this kind of scenario that John Armstrong writes about being talked about in a different context.
And that there was a whole thing about Oswald's passport once he ended up in Russia, which Hoover was very concerned about.
We know from the official record the FBI had said in 1960, we are concerned that an imposter may be using Oswald's passport in Russia.
That's unbelievable.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's documented fact.
You can pull the records on that.
That's three years before the assassination.
And that's Hoover, the director of the FBI, saying, An Oswald imposter is out there.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's a lot of other indications of that, too.
So, you know, it's just endlessly, it's a rabbit hole.
You know, you start going down it, and you don't know quite if you're ever going to reach the center of the earth.
I mean, it's.
Yeah.
It plays with your mind, and you just eventually, it's very hard to sort out fact from fiction.
And I think that was by design.
I think whoever.
And that's the other reason I thought Willoughby could have been involved because he was a genius.
You know, he was a master at this kind of manipulation and spy games, or Dulles, too, for that matter.
Yeah.
And Edward Lansdale.
Yeah.
I met Lansdale.
I spent an afternoon with him.
Oh, how was that?
It was interesting.
You know, I don't know.
He probably pulled the wool over my eyes, but I didn't suspect him as somebody who would have been involved in the assassination.
I spent time with Angleton, James Angleton, head of counterintelligence.
I interviewed him three times, and he was always trying to point the.
Finger to the at the at the Russians, yeah, which was the nature of the beast in terms of who he was.
Well, uh, Angleton was such a high CIA official.
How did this meeting come about?
I don't know.
Angleton was gone by then.
I mean, he, yeah, retired.
Well, he was kind of fired as the head of counterintelligence in 74 during this all this scandalous stuff about how the CIA had been spying on Americans, which was not part of its charter.
There was a huge sweep there.
Where they got rid of a lot of people, and they had a director in who was very open, Colby, who was sharing a lot of secrets.
But Angleton was one of those guys who was on his way out along with Helms.
Yeah, and Angleton, I guess, you know, I was working for the Village Voice, and I wasn't that prominent a journalist, you know, but I called him up or something, I found him, and he said I wanted to interview him, and he agreed to do it.
So we met, and we met three times in the Army Navy Club where he used to wine and dine me.
I don't know what the hell was going on.
He never tried to recruit me or anything, but I remember.
I remember one night, he'd drink, he liked to drink.
He'd have some martinis.
And I remember having dinner with him one night, and suddenly he'd say something.
He'd say, You can't write this down, but I know who killed Sam Giancana.
Wow.
Who was the Chicago mafia who had recently been murdered and could have talked about the assassination, da da da.
And I said, Oh, really?
I said, Well, who was that?
And so he said, Well, it wasn't the CIA, it was some Cubans, and da da da da.
Then the dinner goes on a little longer, and he says, I know where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried.
I said, Oh, well.
I was like crazy.
It's this great dinner conversation.
Yeah.
So, why he was saying these things, I maybe had a few drinks.
I don't know.
He was a strange dude.
He was tall, this Hamburg hat, and looked kind of like a stoop-shouldered, and looked kind of like an ostrich.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's very unusual looking.
Yeah.
I remember the first time I interviewed him, this movie had just come out called Seven Days of the Condor.
Yeah.
With Robert Redford, which was a pretty scary movie about what happens to somebody looking into all this stuff.
And I remember interviewing Angleton, going to see that movie, and really being pretty spooked.
I was scared out of my wits by the end of that night.
What did you make of it?
Well, Angleton ran this, you know, so many dark operations for the CIA.
What was it like to be in his presence?
Was it kind of a dark presence?
I would say so.
And I could tell that there were a lot of things he just was not going to talk about.
He'd say things like, well, you know, we'll never know who really killed President Kennedy until they release all the dossiers in Russia, in Minsk, and in Havana.
So, as if they had the keys.
And, you know, maybe in some sense they did.
I mean, they've had Nigel's, you know, in Russia.
And I once mentioned Nigel's name to Angleton, and he just changed his stuff.
Interesting.
Didn't want to deal with that at all.
Didn't seem to.
But if there is any real sort of evidence that links Oswald to the CIA, you did so much work on Antonio Vesciana.
And, of course, on the 50th anniversary, he came out and said that David Attlee Phillips.
Was Maurice Bishop, his case officer, and that he met him with Oswald in September 63.
How do you feel about that kind of revelation?
Does your work feel vindicated, or do you feel like the media should have gone and talked about this maybe?
Well, you know, I don't know.
I mean, yeah, my work feels vindicated.
I mean, I always thought that Maurice Bishop was Phillips, and I met with Vietchiana several times in 1970.
It's kind of strange.
I mean, again, I was out in Miami doing a piece for a magazine called New Times that existed back then about the Murders going on in Little Havana.
I had nothing to do with the Kennedy thing.
And so I was, but I had read an article in the Saturday Evening Post that said that Vicciana had some knowledge of anti Castro plotting and had known Sylvia Odio or something or known her father, her father, I believe.
And so I called him up and asked if I could interview him.
I met him at the Trailways bus station in Miami and we sat down in a cafe and he said, So let me see your, can I see your government card?
I said, Well, you know.
I'm not with the government.
I'm a journalist.
So I think I convinced him after a little bit I was who I said I was.
And he began to reveal this incredible story, which was that he'd been involved in all these plots to kill Castro.
He had a CIA case officer he called Bishop, who was called into a meeting in August of 63 and had Oswald there at the meeting and this young guy who said nothing, but obviously was connected to him somehow.
And so he was telling this story at the same time to Gate and Fonzie of the.
House Select Committee investigator who lived in Miami and was very interesting.
Investigator, yeah, oh, he's terrific.
And I happened to be staying with Gayton at the time in Miami, but Vichyana said, You can't tell Gayton that I'm talking to you about this, so it was kind of a little bit awkward, you know.
I mean, I didn't, and eventually, Vichyana, who didn't speak English that well, then brought his daughter to this hotel room and she translated for us.
So I sat on this story.
He told me if I published this.
His life could be in danger, and I respected that.
So I didn't do anything.
And then, all of a sudden, in 76, at some point, Jack Anderson did a column, a syndicated national column, about a Mr. X coming out in the Kennedy assassination.
And that was obviously to anybody in the know, that was Vecchiano.
And it told the whole story.
So somebody had leaked this, not Gaten Fonsi, I'm sure, he was a very honorable man.
Given this story to Anderson.
So after that, a little while went by, and I did do a piece where I named Richiana because it was already out there.
And then I think it was 1979, he was shot outside that same trailways bus station, shot in the head.
Amazing.
But he did survive and lived to a ripe old age, and did on his deathbed talk about David Phillips as having been his case officer, therefore, having been connected with Lee Harvey Osborne.
Well, it's interesting because the House Assassination Committee, you obviously brought Vesiana out of the shadows in a sense.
But the House Assassination Committee had this habit of bringing these people into these situations, and then it seems like they're unprotected and they get shot at, they get killed, whatever it happens to be.
So it almost seems like, you know, if someone had valuable information, it would just take incredible courage to come forward because you're obviously putting your life out there.
And they didn't seem to be really, they didn't have any protections or security set up for that, it seemed like.
Oh, I don't think they didn't, and I don't know if they could have.
Decades Of Cover Up Threads00:04:25
I mean, they're a congressional committee, you know, so.
And there was already a lot of controversy about what they were looking into.
They'd had Richard Sprague as their chief counsel, then, through a series of reasons, Sprague was looking too closely at the CIA, so they dumped him.
Blakey came in and was much more interested in the mafia, so the mafia angle to this.
And yeah, but if you look back at, I mean, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there was a long list of so called mysterious deaths, which Penn Jones put together years ago.
But then in 75 76, when a lot of the secrets were coming out and These investigations were ongoing in 77, and a heck of a lot of people suddenly died.
So, this is the second wave of deaths associated.
Sam Giancano, William Harvey of the CIA, Johnny Roselli's body found in an oil drum in Miami's Biscayne Bay, Carlos Prior, Manuel Artime at 45 with a heart attack, and many names and more that came up as having been knowledgeable at least of what may have happened back then.
They were gone.
A lot of them were mafia people or intelligence operatives.
Yes, that's right.
Many of them.
And the House Select Committee did its best, and they did what history forgets or what people don't recall in the more recent buttressing again officially of the Warren Commission findings that Oswald acted alone.
The House Assassinations Committee came out in 1979 and said there was a conspiracy.
They said that the ballistic evidence and everything that they could put together showed that there had been more than one gunman.
But people somehow don't refer to that very much.
I mean, they prefer to say the Warren Commission, which, you know, it's.
It's BS.
Yeah.
Well, it's so discredited in so many ways for it to be the official word that people refer back to as absurd.
Yeah, exactly.
And even, you know, it's coming out now that the Kennedy family never believed the Warren Commission either.
At least Robert Kennedy never did.
And, you know, so will we ever get to the bottom of it?
I have my doubts.
I mean, I think, you know, people have done their best.
There are a lot of really terrific researchers out there.
I was probably the first.
Journalist to delve into this full time for a long period of time.
And, you know, I was haunted by it, you know, and really wanted to, wanted the truth to be revealed so that this country could, our country, could move on, you know, from a place that I don't think we've ever really recovered from, which was 50 years ago now.
But I think once something of that magnitude happens and it's basically the truth is not told about it.
That colors everything that has happened ever since, you know, through the situation we've got today with the surveillance state that we live in post 9 11 and, you know, the NSA revelations and the gridlock in Congress where nothing can get done.
I mean, you know, we called back in the 60s.
And for the four great leaders, starting with JFK and then Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, were all gunned down.
With them, I think, went a lot of not just hopes, but chances for real change the way a lot of my generation, at least, and others too, envisioned could come to pass back then.
And you do feel, you can feel the threads of that JFK cover up going through the 70s and Watergate and sort of the 80s Iran Contra and coming along right up through 9 11.
And it's almost like all that stuff grew up, and here we are in the middle of it.
And the fact that it's been unchecked and unacknowledged by the establishment, this is the thing.
If we could understand the JFK as sort of one of the turning points in history, we'd understand this kind of militarized, centralized state that we're starting to live in more and more since 9 11.
I think you're absolutely right about that.
And it's a great tragedy for the country and for future generations of the country that this has come to pass.
And so you've got a situation now where you have the biggest threat.
Unchecked Militarized State Growth00:02:51
Ever facing civilization, which is climate change, and you know, all these guys in Congress still denying the highly legitimate science that exists, and you know, and gridlock in terms of any action to do something about it.
And you know, what are our kids and grandkids going to live with?
It's pretty unthinkable.
And so, you know, I'm not saying it's totally hopeless, I think there's you can get out there and fight like hell to change things, but it's going to take a lot more than well, we just don't have the leadership that we.
Had or that was beginning to come to the fore back in the 1960s, and that's a real sad thing.
And you've gone so deep into the kind of dark American heart when your books with Jesse Ventura.
I just want to get you to touch on that for a minute because how did you come across Governor Ventura?
He's a very interesting character and a great speaker and a great thinker, I think.
Oh, he is.
He's a very intelligent guy, and I ran into him in Mexico actually.
I was down there.
Some friends have a place there, and he had just bought a house in the Baja.
We ran into each other in a local watering hole, and he had read my book on the Kennedy Assassin, the man who knew too much, that book, and liked it.
Anyway, we ran into each other again on the beach, my wife and he and his wife, and they came up for dinner.
We hit it off, and he just said, Well, if you're going to be back here next year, maybe we can work on my memoir together.
So we did.
Then that was published by Skyhorse in New York, and that led to doing American conspiracies and 63 documents the government doesn't want you to read.
That's a great book.
Thank you.
And then political, you know, Democrats and re bloodlicans for a third party because these two parties are so co opted, and then they killed our president last year.
So, you know, I mean, we don't agree on everything politically, but it doesn't matter.
I mean, I think Jeff has great integrity, and he's an amazing promoter.
I think working with him gave me an opportunity also to get some things out of my system, stuff that I've researched for years that I don't have the name he does, name recognition.
So it's great.
You can get out there and turn the book into a bestseller, and I can help put all the information together, and we can prove that to the American people.
Yeah, you created a whole partnership dynamic that you see rippling through, like Richard Belzer, and he has someone who sort of did the core research and writing, and then He was doing the presentation basically, and you created this with Ventura very early on.
Operation Northwoods And 9/1100:02:22
So, yes, the other people hopping on the model, yes, David.
Well, and his co worker there is David Wayne, who also worked on the uh, they killed our president with Jesse.
Okay, strangely enough, I've never met David, but he's a really good researcher, and uh, and he's done some really fine stuff with Richard Belzer, whom I also know and is a great guy.
You know, you hear a lot of um, sort of fluff and fantasy around Operation Northwoods, one way or another, but can you?
Can you tell me from your experience what was Operation Northwoods and how does it relate to some of the things that we've seen after the fact, like 9 11, et cetera?
Well, Operation Northwoods was a plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was being kept secret from President Kennedy back in the early 1960s.
And it was some of these really crazy guys, I don't know, Lemnitz or one of them.
Was to actually do a domestic operation, hijack a plane in Florida.
I think it was all going to take place in Florida.
And then they were going to ditch the plane somewhere.
And I don't know quite how they were going to get the people off it if they were, but you can follow the similarities here.
And the whole thing was going to be blamed on Castro's Cuba and it was going to spark an invasion of the island.
So let's just say that what happened on 9 11 had its precursor or, you know, Its ancestor in that kind of idea that was fomented actually on American soil.
Whether that happened in 9 11, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that could have been the case.
I don't know.
I've not researched 9 11, so I'm not going to say per se, but certainly we know Bush knew ahead of time that Osama bin Laden was planning something.
He knew it and saw a memo in August of that year, 2001.
There was foreknowledge that something was going down, even if the American government didn't pull it off themselves.
I'm talking about people like Cheney.
Right.
And then how well, it's just eerie how Northwoods sounds like a 9 11 style scenario.
But how did we get the Northwoods document and info?
MKUltra And Watergate Secrets00:14:57
The National Security Archive, which is a wonderful organization in Washington, that's all they do is they work at getting documents from the government about earlier American history that.
Tell a story that we didn't know before.
And so they were able to pry these documents, I don't know exactly how, but out of the Under Free of Information Act, out of the archives, and they published them.
And yeah, now it's documented.
It's amazing.
It is.
It's pretty damned amazing.
That's one that you feel really slipped through the cracks because it feels like that shouldn't be out there somehow.
There are two people who I forgot to mention earlier when we were discussing Nagel.
One of them is Gordon Novell, who you spent a little time with, who was sort of one of those mysterious characters, definitely a kind of spook.
Can you tell me a little bit about your time with Gordon Novell?
Oh, Gordon was one of those guys that, I don't know, we hit it off.
I mean, some of these guys I really liked.
Great personality, right?
You know, he put me into his house, and he told me all kinds of yarns, you know.
And he was indeed, you know, he was, you could never tell with some of these guys.
Hemming was another one, you know, how much was truth and how much was sort of, you know, pumping himself up, yeah.
Yeah, you know, I mean, Novell was one of those kind of guys.
But Gordon had some real strong inside connections, and.
So, I remember, you know, I found him fascinating to be around, and he knew about a lot of things that he was willing to tell me.
And, you know, sadly, he ended up getting thrown into jail for a long time for, I forget what it was.
It was later after I knew him.
And now he's out, and he's still alive, as far as I know, and looking into things like UFOs and alternative energy.
Right.
You know, he just passed away, actually.
Oh, actually?
He did, yeah.
Fascinating guy, though.
I agree with you.
And I always felt that, you know, his early.
He just seemed to be in too good a position early on.
Here he is working with Johnson and Nixon, but also showing up to help with Garrison.
And then he winds up helping Garrison.
And then they're sort of spying on Garrison and using him to spy on Garrison.
I mean, Novell and Nigel, but Novell had certainly had connections.
And it was he, I think, who arranged for me to interview Charles Colson, who was Nixon's hatchet guy who said he'd walk over his grandmother and get Nixon elected.
And Paulson had become a born again evangelist and gave me an amazing interview, which I published in Argosy Magazine.
I think I recently posted it on my website.
Oh, great.
He told me some stuff that had not been talked about before in terms of what was really behind Watergate, and I can't remember it all now.
But that was Novell that arranged for me to do that.
So he obviously had some pretty high level connections.
He had the amazing connections.
What did he tell you about the JFK assassination?
Could he help you there?
Oh, you know, no.
I mean, yes and no.
I could never sort it out, really.
I didn't write about him in my book.
I just couldn't sort out where it all connected.
I mean, certainly he was, you know, Garrison was interested in him and he was very tied into the Cuban exile community.
And one time I was with him in New Orleans, we drove by the Town and Country Motel.
He says, Oh, you want to meet Carlos?
Meaning Marcello.
I said, Okay, yeah, sure.
And he went in, but Carlos was out.
So, I mean, he knew him.
You know, he knew these people.
Wow.
I don't know.
Well, you were lucky to miss that meeting, maybe.
Perhaps so.
Yeah, I'm still here talking to you.
Kerry Thornley is someone who pops up in that world.
He's a guy who sort of bunked with Oswald in the military and actually wrote a novel about him.
Did he come up?
I know Garrison was interested in him as a possible Oswald double.
Did he come up in your investigation at all?
I talked to him months, I think, on the phone.
He was pretty spooky and didn't really want to get into it.
I don't think he looked that much like Oswald.
Yeah, he doesn't.
My impression was that, you know, yeah, he certainly knew him in the Marines and he did write a book about him in, I don't know, 1960, based a whole novel around this guy.
So weird.
Oswald's supposed to be a nobody, but you have, like, J. Edgar Hoover interested in him and guys writing novels about him.
Crazy.
He was, like I say, a real enigma.
Okay.
And the other one I had was Lauren Hall, which I find very interesting.
What can you tell me about him?
Well, I met with him a couple of times.
He was the.
There were these two human exiles that showed up at the door of Sylvia Odio with a Leon Oswald in late September of 63.
The FBI fingered these guys as Lauren Hall and Lawrence Howard.
I talked to both of them.
They were not.
I mean, they were in Dallas.
They knew of the Odio people, but they didn't really know Oswald.
I believed them, you know, that they were kind of guys the FBI put in to say, oh, well, these were the two guys that went to the door, but, you know, they didn't really have any connection with Oswald.
So, you know, Hall did have very high level.
Connections to the mafia, though.
And he was, you know, he had an end to Traficante in Miami or in Florida and Tampa.
And he was, I think he was on the periphery, knowledgeable of certain things, which, you know, he did talk to me about at some length.
And I wrote a big piece about him for the Village Voice back in 76 or 77.
Fascinating.
And did he tell you anything about Oswald?
Nothing that particularly.
He didn't know very much.
I don't think so.
He said he knew people who knew him, like this Cuban exile guy, but I don't know.
But Hemming actually knew Oswald.
He had run into him in 1959, I think, at the Cuban embassy or something.
At least he said he did, and he probably did.
Hemming was.
He knew a lot of people.
He was a soldier of fortune.
He was fighting to overthrow Castro.
He was a great big guy, 6'6.
Oh, unbelievable.
Yeah, and he was a character.
I mean, I used to roam around with him in Miami and he would.
Tell me tales, introduce me to people.
I mean, the characters I met were quite fascinating in their own right, to say the least.
And then I'd have to go back and try to figure out.
First, you know, I mean, one thing as a reporter is I usually believe everybody that I'm listening to.
I'm not there to correct them.
I mean, you know, tell me what you know and I'll ask you these questions.
And so that's the nature of being a journalist.
And then later, you got to go back and sit down and think, well, does this really add up?
You know, I mean, all you guys can't be telling me the straight.
So I had to choose.
And I think of all the people that I interviewed, and there were a lot of them, there were only two really that I absolutely thought I would trust him 100%.
And those were Nagel and Vicciano, Antonio Vicciano.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, some of the witnesses that come out we feel are too good to be true, like James Files, who puts himself shooting.
And there's just, you know, he seems kind of like, you know, the kind of guy who would just sort of put himself in that.
He's definitely a criminal.
He was definitely Ron Dallas.
But does that mean he had anything to do with this?
I honestly can't believe that anybody who would have been there shooting in Dealey Plaza that day would have been allowed to live.
You know, just.
And then you got a lot of people coming out in years since saying, I was there and I did it.
I mean, Charles Harrelson said that.
Files, Chauncey Holtz was around.
I mean,.
Yeah.
I mean, I just.
I mean, their motive, I don't know, and maybe they knew people, but I tend to doubt those kind of stories.
This one I know is tricky, but it's.
Like Judith Verry Baker, you've come across so many of the witnesses who've come forward and the way that you would have addressed a witness or believed them or not.
And you've probably seen enough of her testimony.
What do you think?
It's obvious that she was at the Riley Coffee Company, but what do you think of her sort of painting this gigantic picture of Lee Oswald?
I don't really know.
I have met her.
I didn't disbelieve her.
I found her actually quite a sincere person.
So.
At least on the face of things.
I don't know, you know, are certain things embellished over the years, after 50 years, that to further this, just for whatever reason, to make Lee Oswald look better or whatever?
I don't know.
I mean, she probably did know him and may have been his girlfriend.
She says she was in New Orleans.
Ventura finds her perfectly credible.
He thinks that she's, you know, she fills in a lot of the gaps that he'd never been able to fill in before.
So maybe he's right.
I'm not going to go that far, but I think.
That's certainly worth listening to and paying attention to and tracking down as much as one can the leads that she gives.
Sure.
You met Garrison and you had this interaction over time.
What was your feeling about Garrison because he's such a complex figure, but he did so much for this case?
But you participated in an event recently in Nevada about Garrison, and there's the whole thing that John Barber did this magnificent documentary about him.
Sure did.
And I mean, I think John Barber's documentary on Garrison is.
Right at the top of any film that's been made about what happened to President Kennedy.
He did tremendous research.
He was the producer of Real People, a TV series back in the 70s.
He'd been a hot guy all his life.
He had this panel discussion afterwards in Las Vegas after he showed the film.
That was you and.
Joan Mellon and Jim Morris.
Joan Mellon, who's very.
She wrote a lot about Garrison.
Yeah.
And, you know, all I would say is that Garrison, when I met with him, certainly came off as a tragic figure.
I mean, somebody who really.
Was onto something, did his best to get the truth out about it.
Certainly couldn't get very far with someone like David Ferry, who was suddenly dead at the very beginning of his investigation.
Clay Shaw, I don't know, was he really involved with Oswald and an assassination plot?
I tend to doubt it, but that isn't to say you dismiss Garrison.
I mean, he was the first one to bring to light that something was not right with these findings, and there were all his connections to the Cuban exile community and CIA.
Garrison did an amazing job.
Service, I think, to this country.
And John Barber really captures that with his film, which is now available on DVD through Amazon.
Well, it's amazing because there's such a media hatchet job around Garrison that it's still hard to get good information on him unless you go to these really good sources like Mellon, Barber, people like this who knew him, knew the story well.
When you just hear the kind of scuttlebutt after it, what you're getting is, you know, oh, he was a lunatic, he drugged witnesses, he was power mad.
Like, really incredible stories.
So, it seems like that mechanism for discrediting him is still active.
Oh, yeah, I think it is.
I mean, they were after him then.
I mean, there are CIA files that have come out.
You know, how do we not just temper, but derail Garrison's investigation?
And there were more than one Pentagon that the agency put onto his staff to screw things up and lead him in different directions that weren't fruitful.
So, yeah, I mean, he was.
You have somebody, it was a DA.
You know, I mean, he had the power in New Orleans.
He could subpoena witnesses.
New Orleans was a real important place.
Oswald had lived there and associated with Bannister there and Ferry.
And, you know, Garrison was on to something big.
And that scared the hell out of people at the top.
And still does today because nobody, the media still don't want to investigate or admit that they have egg on their face because they never did investigate when you could what happened to President Kennedy.
That's an interesting point of view, actually.
So it would almost be more out of not wanting to embarrass themselves by.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting because Marchetti wrote that Helms in one of these meetings had said, Are we giving enough help to Shaw?
And are we basically screwing things up enough for Garrison?
Which is a pretty high level confirmation that the CIA had an interest in disrupting Garrison's efforts in New Orleans.
He was talking about Helms, who was the director of the CIA at the time.
And so when you think about Garrison, you know, you're thinking about the CIA really wanted to shut him up.
Interestingly enough, he's one of the first people who mentioned the mind control operations in MKUltra.
And that could have been another reason why I just wanted to be like, let's just shut this guy down.
That was something that started to come out in the late 1970s.
And most of that story we'll never know because all those files were destroyed.
But there certainly was a mind control operation called MKUltra.
The military had their own.
And what they used was LSD and hypnosis and various other techniques to try to basically brainwash people, get them under their control so that they could be used in various undercover ways, and often without people knowing about it.
And people forget that that really happened.
And there were hearings about it in the late 1970s.
Scary stuff.
That stuff hadn't gone away.
You wouldn't think.
Do you think that MKUltra was used in any of these kind of larger political assassinations?
I'm thinking about the Robert Kennedy assassination.
I would almost bet on it.
I would bet on it.
Sirhan was programmed, you know, that he didn't remember what happened.
He didn't fire all those shots.
He was given a command from a girl in a Pugadot dress.
I mean, you know, and this is ongoing.
There's a Potentially a case that'll be brought, and people have been trying to, you know.
But I don't know if he remembers anything.
I mean, I don't think he does, so I don't think you're going to get too far with him, except to maybe show that, yeah, he was.
He was programmed.
He was programmed to take part in that assassination.
So, MKUltra, then, you would consider a very important area of study when you're looking at some of the bigger national assassinations that took place in history.
I would.
I mean, it could have played a role in the Kennedy assassination of JFK, too.
I. I've thought that.
I've looked into things about it.
It's too big a subject to go into right now, but there's food for thought there.
Well, my last question for you, Dick, and I really appreciate it.
It's been a fantastic interview.
CIA Using Phillips As Pawn00:03:02
I want to go back to Nagel just real briefly.
When you think of him as a person and the way that he was with you, and he opened up somewhat and he shared these amazing things and gave you pieces of a story about Oswald being used as a patsy and being involved in this larger plan around the assassination.
What occurs to you now when you think back to it?
What kind of impression do you have of Nagel looking back on him 20, 25 years ago?
He was a tragic figure.
He was a guy who I think really wanted to come forth, to come clean, as he put it once, to tell everything he knew, and yet he was trapped.
He'd been done all his time in prison.
He wanted to stay alive.
He had a couple of kids.
You know, he didn't want to be someone with a lot of notoriety.
And I know that, and he was trying to get money out of the military at the time, a full disability compensation, and he was suing them to get it.
And, you know, looking back, I think in a sense he used me.
You know, I was like the stick over the head saying, you know, if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to tell this guy everything I know.
And he never did.
And in fact, once he won that lawsuit for a long period of time, that was it.
He wouldn't talk to me anymore.
So, you know, but I don't resent that.
I mean, I.
I was frustrated over the course of many years because I knew that this guy held the key, or a lot of the keys, and he would only go so far.
I really wanted, obviously, to put the truth out there.
But, you know, did the best I could.
Maybe he did the best he could as far as he could go.
And, you know, that's at least certainly knowing him, I came away more convinced than ever that there was a conspiracy.
It wasn't a vast, huge government conspiracy involving hundreds of people because you couldn't keep that kind of thing quiet.
And there wouldn't have been that many people involved.
But, you know, so it may have been relatively small at the core.
With other people kind of, you know, with their tenterhooks into it and keeping an eye on it.
But Nagella, I don't think he knew the whole story either, the whole picture.
I mean, that was the name of the game.
You obfuscate, you hide, you, you know.
And it's a sad world, but that was the world during the Cold War, certainly, and in different ways today.
Right.
Well, misinformation is king.
I guess the crucial question that comes up regarding the CIA is this If Oswald was involved, like they tell us he was, what if it was proved that he was one of their agents?
As people like Vesiana have gone on record saying that Bishop, who was Attlee Phillips, worked with Oswald, then it doesn't look good if they make him out to be guilty if he's CIA, right?
So I wonder how fast they'd be willing to change that verdict and calling him the lone assassin if it was proven he was one of their guys.
Obfuscation In Deep Politics00:01:49
So I guess they have set up a bad dynamic for themselves because making him guilty and if he's a CIA agent.
Well, it could well have been, too, that the CIA was using him in other ways.
In fact, I think that's true.
That had nothing to do with the assassination.
So, you had elements of the CIA played off against each other.
Maybe you had this small element that hated Kennedy, wanted to get rid of him, put the blame on Castro, have the U.S. get rid of Castro at the same time.
And that was one cabal, as it were.
Then you had this other arm of the CIA that was using Oswald with Fair Play for Cuba committee stuff.
And maybe Phillips was part of that.
I don't know.
Maybe Phillips wasn't this dire conspirator trying to get rid of Kennedy.
But then, how's it going to look?
I mean, the guy's connected to the CIA.
People are going to.
Jump to all kinds of conclusions.
So, you can't ever let that come out if you're the CIA.
So, I think that that's quite likely part of this scenario we're talking about.
Well, Dick, I want to thank you for joining us today.
Your books are so interesting and informative.
This is definitely not armchair journalism.
You're right there in the arena with the key players.
And that's what I think makes the man who knew too much so interesting.
It's that soul connection or the human aspects of these books that's so intriguing.
So, thank you for shedding light.
On the dark areas of deep politics and the JFK assassination.
Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you, and I wish you luck with your documentaries and look forward to seeing them.
Thanks, Dick.
Thank you for joining me for this powerful interview with Dick Russell on Richard Case Niguel, the CIA, and the JFK assassination.
You can find more special reports, interviews, and documentaries at www.darkjournalist.com.