True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 334: JFK 201 (Part 1) Aired: 2023-11-16 Duration: 01:03:29 === Dave Brubeck Impression (02:10) === [00:00:00] Can't remember his last name. [00:00:01] I was going to do an impression of a guy, but I can't remember his last name. [00:00:03] It's the impressions. [00:00:05] Just a guy? [00:00:06] No, dude. [00:00:07] No. [00:00:08] I don't know why I said that. [00:00:10] No, no, dude. [00:00:12] No, dude. [00:00:13] A specific guy, but I can't remember his last name, so I can't say that I'm him. [00:00:19] What's his first name? [00:00:20] Dave. [00:00:21] Dave? [00:00:22] It's Dave Brubeck. [00:00:24] That's who you wanted to do an impression of? [00:00:26] Yeah, my fucking famous Dave Brubeck impression. [00:00:29] do it yeah it's mostly about the notes between the notes Like, to me, jazz is about the notes that you don't play. [00:00:51] That's my Dave Brubeck impression. [00:00:52] I was expecting it to be really bad, but I actually thought that was pretty good Really when you came in with the [00:01:24] Yeah. [00:01:24] You gotta look good. [00:01:25] You have a good, like, kind of internal blowing, like, horn sound you got going on there. [00:01:30] Yeah, it's nice. [00:01:32] I feel like I could be in another era, probably one of the best jazz. [00:01:37] Like, if I was born. [00:01:39] No. [00:01:39] Just whatever you're about to say, I'm going to say no. [00:01:42] 1899, I think I would have invented jazz. [00:01:45] No. [00:01:46] And also, you were doing so well with the very adorable Brubeck impression. [00:01:50] And then you got to come out with the I Would Have Invented Jazz. [00:01:53] I have the greatest record I have. [00:01:56] The prize of my collection is I have a cool weird 45 that his son did called You'll Lose. [00:02:03] Is it good? [00:02:04] It's great. [00:02:05] I found out that place with Rookie Ricardo's. [00:02:06] It's incredible. [00:02:07] It's better than Dave Brubeck did. [00:02:09] Not a big fan of Dave Brubeck, to be honest. === Award-Winning Guest Reflects (04:56) === [00:02:10] No. [00:02:11] No. [00:02:11] I feel like I'm better than him. [00:02:13] I think it's, you know, it's perfect for a romantic comedy from the 90s. [00:02:18] Yeah, which is the opposite of how I live my life. [00:02:20] I live my life. [00:02:21] Is how I live my life. [00:02:23] You do. [00:02:24] You do. [00:02:24] You never have frizzy enough hair. [00:02:26] Thank you. [00:02:27] That was a compliment? [00:02:28] Thank you. [00:02:29] I don't understand women. [00:02:31] My name is Dave Brubeck. [00:02:37] Praise Brubeck. [00:02:39] Praise me. [00:02:40] I'm Liz. [00:02:40] We are, of course, joined by producer Yang Chomsky, and this is Druinon. [00:02:46] Hello. [00:02:47] We are, what's the month, Liz? [00:02:49] Can you check your calendar? [00:02:51] It's November. [00:02:52] Your favorite month. [00:02:53] It's an okay month. [00:02:54] What's your favorite month? [00:02:56] I'm not telling you. [00:02:58] You're not telling me. [00:03:00] It's a whole two. [00:03:00] We're about to spend like three months. [00:03:01] I have a couple of favorite months. [00:03:03] November's one of them. [00:03:05] Crazy. [00:03:06] November sucks. [00:03:06] Yeah, whatever. [00:03:07] May is another. [00:03:08] Also shitty. [00:03:10] And I really like December, classic. [00:03:13] What the frick is wrong with you? [00:03:15] I love Christmas. [00:03:17] And holiday tricks. [00:03:17] It's crazy to base your pleasure of a month on the holidays within. [00:03:23] Everyone knows the best months are like June, September. [00:03:26] Okay, get that out of the way. [00:03:27] But personal faves, I like a December. [00:03:29] I'm not to remember. [00:03:31] I'm rocking with August. [00:03:33] Unbearably hot. [00:03:34] Yeah, you would. [00:03:36] It sucks, but it's, but you know what's better than the cold of December? [00:03:42] The heat of summer. [00:03:44] You know, you say that now, but I'm going to record you in the summer because it's not at all. [00:03:48] It's hot in here, dude. [00:03:49] It's just hot in here. [00:03:50] No. [00:03:51] What? [00:03:53] I'm like a beach guy. [00:03:54] Yeah. [00:03:55] Very little Christmas. [00:03:56] I haven't got to the beach. [00:03:57] Let's get into years. [00:03:59] JFK. [00:04:00] The episode. [00:04:01] We are talking today. [00:04:02] We have with us Ben Howard and Aaron Goode. [00:04:08] Two people you know and love. [00:04:09] I think Ben's been on the show. [00:04:11] In fact, not even think. [00:04:12] Ben has been on the show by far more than any other guest, I would say. [00:04:18] I was thinking about this earlier. [00:04:20] Ben's been remembered. [00:04:21] He's just not mic'd up. [00:04:23] I know he's just right here. [00:04:24] Just sitting here. [00:04:26] Ben, off the top of your head, how many Trumanon episodes have you been on? [00:04:30] There was a whole 9-11. [00:04:32] I actually forgot about one because I forgot that we did those ones with my brother. [00:04:35] Yeah, I was saying your brother has also been on the show. [00:04:38] I actually forgot about that because, yeah, it's been a lot. [00:04:41] It was 9-11, Boston voluming, JFK, like a couple of one off the street. [00:04:45] Those are some of the things that we're doing. [00:04:46] Oh, my God, dude. [00:04:47] We did the NATO series with you. [00:04:49] NATO. [00:04:49] Yeah, those are Gladio. [00:04:51] Yeah, that was part of NATO. [00:04:53] I can't remember. [00:04:55] Those are some people's favorites, I gotta say. [00:04:56] It's been a lot. [00:04:59] I think you're our award-winning guest. [00:05:02] Which is actually, it's so crazy because we have an award here to give you. [00:05:05] Oh, my God. [00:05:06] Actually, yes, Liz, show him the, we do have a real award. [00:05:10] Oh, my God. [00:05:12] I don't think you want it, but we were sent this by the insane-looking new Patreon. [00:05:20] It's the craziest thing. [00:05:22] And I queried, I queried other. [00:05:26] We don't know. [00:05:27] I'll just describe what this is. [00:05:28] It looks like a misshapen jelly bean with a child's face on it. [00:05:33] And I think that's a completely accurate assessment. [00:05:36] And this is a Patreon Creator Milestone Award. [00:05:39] Yeah. [00:05:39] I don't know what milestone. [00:05:42] I mean, do you really want to put this on your main story? [00:05:44] For the milestones that you have been a part of in creating so many memorable Patreon episodes. [00:05:51] You share in that award, Ben. [00:05:53] Well, thank you. [00:05:53] I take this proudly. [00:05:55] I got to be honest, I asked a bunch of other people. [00:05:57] It's not Jim's. [00:05:58] No one's getting an award or anything. [00:06:00] It's bedazzled. [00:06:01] That's crazy. [00:06:02] Only we got to what we looked at. [00:06:03] It's like deceptively heavy. [00:06:05] We looked at the lady's other artwork, and let me tell you, it's out of this world. [00:06:12] Stuff that I don't want to say on the show. [00:06:13] Out of this world. [00:06:16] I just, I do appreciate that instead of like the Grammy guy or Oscar, the Oscar. [00:06:22] I actually don't know what Oscar's. [00:06:23] That's the same thing as the Grammys? [00:06:24] Yeah, it's a guy. [00:06:25] The guy. [00:06:27] It's not the same. [00:06:27] No, Grammys. [00:06:28] No, Academy Awards is the same thing. [00:06:29] Yeah. [00:06:30] The Academy of Awards. [00:06:31] Oh, yeah. [00:06:31] The Grammy's a record player. [00:06:32] Yeah, a record player. [00:06:34] And then the moon man for MTV. [00:06:36] This is the opera singer from Fifth Elements. [00:06:41] As it's leaving her body. [00:06:43] It's also like going somewhere else. [00:06:45] I genuinely think this is the only award I've ever gotten in my life. [00:06:51] This is incredible. [00:06:52] I don't even know who gets awards. [00:06:53] You know what, though? [00:06:54] It's just nice to be nominated. [00:06:57] It's nice to win. [00:06:58] That's how I don't understand when people say that. [00:07:00] It's like, okay, it's nice to be nominated. [00:07:02] Ben just tried to hand it back to Liz, but she was looking at me. [00:07:04] Yeah, it's like, it's really nice to give it to me. === The Best Part About Parades (04:10) === [00:07:07] All right. [00:07:08] So we have Ben here. [00:07:09] And if you know, if we have Ben here, you know you're about to hear more than one episode of something. [00:07:14] Ben, what are we talking about? [00:07:15] We're talking about JFK. [00:07:17] We're talking about Lee Harvey Oswald, especially and all of his various escapades and an international man of mystery and what people knew and didn't know about what was going on with that little Mexico City thing. [00:07:30] God, he's so good. [00:07:31] A natural. [00:07:32] Let's get to it. [00:07:44] What a brisk but beautiful November day here in Dallas, Texas. [00:07:52] I love being president. [00:07:55] The best part to me about it is the parades. [00:07:58] And the best part about parades to me is this extraordinary, I pronounce weird because I'm from the Northeast. [00:08:07] It's this extraordinary open-top limousine that I'm allowed to ride in. [00:08:12] They let you do it when you're present. [00:08:14] Time to get my beautiful wife who assures me that she has no taste for the Greeks, only the Irish, and sit right here in this limousine and just head through town. [00:08:27] Ooh, a book depository. [00:08:29] I love books. [00:08:31] In fact, I've written one myself about all of my heroes. [00:08:37] What a wonderful, which is the sound you make when you get shot. [00:08:43] God lets you say a couple words before you die. [00:08:46] And here to say a couple of words and then die with us our independent researcher, Ben Howard, and political scientist and host of the American Exception podcast. [00:08:59] Aaron Good, welcome to the show, guys. [00:09:01] Thanks for having me. [00:09:02] Thanks, Bruce. [00:09:02] It's great to be here. [00:09:04] This is the first time we have both of you here in person. [00:09:07] Aaron, we've had you in person. [00:09:09] Ben, we've never had you in person before. [00:09:10] This is so exciting. [00:09:12] It's a very quaint zone. [00:09:13] I'm excited to be here. [00:09:14] I got to tell you. [00:09:16] One thing that I don't want to dox you or anything here, even though we're saying your first and last name on the show, the guy is massive. [00:09:25] I'm a man of height. [00:09:26] It's been said that's true. [00:09:28] Seven? [00:09:28] No, no. [00:09:29] But it's all in the legs. [00:09:31] All of it's in the legs. [00:09:32] Sort of like a Yao Ming situation that I was just not expecting. [00:09:35] But we're having you guys on because it is about to be the 60th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. [00:09:45] And longtime listeners and true heads will know that we did, we were just trying to figure out how many episodes. [00:09:52] I think we did six. [00:09:53] Six. [00:09:53] We did six episodes. [00:09:55] Just JFK 101 episodes with you guys. [00:09:59] And now we are all gathered here in person for actually the biggest in-person podcast recording session. [00:10:04] That's not true. [00:10:05] We've had four people in person on this. [00:10:07] Really? [00:10:08] Stav and Adam. [00:10:08] Oh, yeah. [00:10:10] But for our second, and first in this studio, we're doing a little JFK 201. [00:10:16] Which we should say, by the way, if people listening, you haven't listened to the 101 series, the six episodes, stop listening to this. [00:10:25] Go back. [00:10:26] That's six hours, and practically actually probably more than 12 hours. [00:10:32] Of primo podcasting that I highly recommend and we'll get you fully pilled on everything that happened to Julia Plaza. [00:10:41] We've done other episodes kind of related to this too, one with Lisa Pease and one with James Eugenio, who I think will come up a little bit later in this little talk. [00:10:51] But we are doing right now, you, I assume because you're a true listener, you have listened to all of those. [00:10:58] And actually, in anticipation of the 60th anniversary, you've recently listened to all those episodes. [00:11:04] And so we're going to skip with some of the maybe the little buildup and we're going to head straight into basically JFK 201 here. [00:11:13] And so I know there was a few things both of you guys wanted to bring to the table here. === Oswald's Mole Hunt Mystery (15:22) === [00:11:18] And one is, and one of my favorite things is both internal workings of the CIA and also Oswald's colorful life in the years leading up to the assassination. [00:11:32] He certainly had a very colorful life. [00:11:34] And I think one of the most interesting places to find out about that is to look at what the CIA says they knew about him. [00:11:42] And reading through troves of documents and CIA bureaucracy is definitely one of my hobbies, one of my pastimes. [00:11:51] And there's ample documentation to go through. [00:11:55] Not as much as there should be. [00:11:56] I mean, there are thousands of documents that are still being withheld, which legally speaking should have been declassified already. [00:12:03] And a bunch that are just straight redacted. [00:12:04] Yeah, or I mean, there are lots of records that have been destroyed as well, where you see references to things that subsequently were just removed from the record entirely. [00:12:14] So clearly, there certainly was more evidence in the documentary record, but even what exists right now and what's been declassified or at least partly declassified, you can start to definitely get a sense that the CIA was less than forthcoming with both the Warren Commission but also with the House Select Committee. [00:12:36] And they knew a lot of things that they didn't say at that time and concealed a lot of things. [00:12:42] And I guess, you know, because there's a lot of arcane technical details about who knew what when and who sent which memo to who. [00:12:51] But really at the end of the day, it's about trying to understand why was this guy who, as we'll discuss, you know, the CIA knew he had attempted to, you know, that he did defect to the USSR in 1959, that he had threatened to give up secrets about something special that he knew, and we can talk about what that was, that he then came back and was involved in organizing for the Fair Play for Cuba committee, allegedly. [00:13:16] You know, he was apparently a big fan of Castro, and yet simultaneously also apparently anti-Castro. [00:13:23] And then he goes to Mexico City and meets again with officials in both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City just weeks before, you know, like six weeks before the assassination. [00:13:38] And for some reason, despite that fact, on October 8th, you know, like six weeks before Kennedy's killed, he's taken off of the FBI's security index. [00:13:48] So when the Secret Service does their sweep of, you know, does anybody happen to work in a book depository who might have a checkered past, to say the least, they don't find anybody on that list. [00:13:59] And so, you know, there's Oswald in the book depository, you know, when Kennedy gets killed. [00:14:05] And whatever you think Oswald's ultimate role in that is, you know, there he is, and he's there to get blamed for what happened. [00:14:14] And so the story of how all of that stuff got suppressed over the course of many years really I think it shows that the CIA's story, that they had no information about him, that their file on him was very small, that he never served their purposes, that he was never an asset of theirs. [00:14:34] There's a ton of evidence that indicates that that's probably not true. [00:14:38] And so it makes all of the continued withholding and lying about all these various documents that are still out there, it makes it all the more difficult to understand. [00:14:50] I mean, you can understand that they want to hide their role in the assassination. [00:14:54] But just on its face, they have an obligation to release this stuff. [00:14:58] There's no reason to believe them about any of it. [00:15:01] It's clear they're still hiding things. [00:15:04] But that's just sits on the table and nobody wants to do anything about it. [00:15:08] Well, yeah, I mean, I think one of the curious aspects of that, right, is like, I mean, people, I think, are usually well aware of this, but like, you know, Oswald defected to the USSR. [00:15:17] That's right. [00:15:18] Oswald defected to the USSR after being in the U.S. military, specifically working on essentially spy planes. [00:15:25] Yeah. [00:15:26] And then says, announces openly, like, I'm going to the USSR. [00:15:30] I'm going to defect. [00:15:32] And I'm going to give them, I mean, I think he tells the consular officer that he meets with before he tears up his passport or whatever, that he's going to give them as many secrets as he knows. [00:15:41] Yeah, about his, so I mean, his, he, he, yeah, to get into his background around the U-2, so he worked on the U-2 spy plane program, which was a CIA surveillance program. [00:15:53] It's a very high-flying surveillance plane that was able to take photos of what was going on in the Soviet Union. [00:16:00] This was before spy satellites and all of that. [00:16:04] And it was a very useful tool for the U.S. to find out specifically what the Soviet Union was doing with ballistic missiles. [00:16:12] This whole thing around the missile gap was a big thing during the Eisenhower administration, this idea that the Soviet Union had these ballistic missiles that would allow them to nuke everybody. [00:16:22] And so, but the U-2 was a huge source of information about what was going on with that. [00:16:27] And Oswald worked at several different U-2 bases with his Marine radar squadron that he was a part of. [00:16:36] He was a radar operator. [00:16:38] So he worked at Atsugi Air Base, or it was a naval air station in Japan, but he was also in the Philippines during the Indonesia crisis in 1958. [00:16:49] It seems like they presumably the CIA was using the U-2 to do spy plane stuff in Indonesia. [00:16:57] And then during the Taiwan Straits crisis that same year. [00:17:00] So Oswald is a Marine radar operator at all of these bases that are associated with the U-2 program. [00:17:07] And it's not a question that they worked with the U-2. [00:17:10] His commanding officer testified, like, we would see the U-2 all the time. [00:17:14] You know, it would park next to our, the hangar, one of the bases they were working at was right next to their barracks. [00:17:19] So they knew it. [00:17:21] And Oswald was tracking these. [00:17:23] And again, his commanding officer, Donovan, talks about how he tracked a U-2 flight over China, which was not acknowledged at the time that that was happening. [00:17:34] And so he certainly knew details about, for instance, how high the U-2 could fly. [00:17:41] He knew details about what was the tempo of the flights because he was tracking a lot of them and his unit was tracking all of them. [00:17:51] So he knew all of these details. [00:17:54] So he, in this, you know, which is, this is itself a crazy story, but he gets a hardship discharge from the Marines to go take care of his ailing, his ailing mother. [00:18:05] That is apparently why he, and I think that happened on September 11th, 1959. [00:18:10] He then, like a month later, is in Moscow. [00:18:14] So he did not apparently have to take care of his mom. [00:18:17] The purpose of it was for him to defect. [00:18:20] And like you said, he goes into the consular office and starts talking to the consular official, who also probably was a CIA asset of some kind. [00:18:29] And yeah, starts saying that he's going to share his radar secrets and that he also has information of special interest. [00:18:39] And it's also a pretty well understood, you know, important context is that all of those embassies are all bugged by the local intelligence agency. [00:18:48] You know, that was something we all learned during the Khashoggi thing where the Saudi consulate where Khashoggi was killed in Turkey. [00:18:54] The Turks had bugged it. [00:18:55] Yeah. [00:18:56] You know, knew everything that was going on. [00:18:58] So it's pretty common. [00:18:58] So it's the same situation here where the KGB has bugged this embassy and everybody knew that. [00:19:06] And so Oswald is saying this stuff to this consular official. [00:19:10] Like, why would you announce your intention to do something illegal? [00:19:15] Yeah. [00:19:16] It's like usually a performance. [00:19:18] And you're trying to, like, ostensibly, Oswald's going in there to convince this guy, like, to give me the paperwork so I can renounce my American citizenship so that I can go tell the Soviets these secrets that I know. [00:19:33] Like, that's obviously not going to encourage the guy to let you do that. [00:19:37] I believe there was a reporter there. [00:19:39] Also, wasn't that Priscilla McMillan there at the Ren did a write-up on it? [00:19:44] And she was somebody who became, you know, she later befriended Marina Oswald. [00:19:49] She was known as a witting CIA asset. [00:19:52] So she just happened to be there to document all these wild and crazy things that Oswald was saying. [00:19:57] Yeah. [00:19:58] Yeah. [00:19:58] And so it's, it's, you know, it seems like he, like you said, it was like a performance. [00:20:02] Like he wanted it. [00:20:04] And it's also possible, you know, the guy who was basically taking this statement from Oswald also had these CIA connections. [00:20:12] Specifically, you know, he had basically gotten instructions from this guy, Brickham, at the CIA, to serve intelligence purposes while he was at the embassy. [00:20:21] And he had openly worked for the CIA before he went to Foreign Service school. [00:20:26] So it seems very plausible to me that this was that he anticipated that Oswald was going to come in and do this. [00:20:33] Oswald certainly knew what to expect. [00:20:35] He talks about how, oh, they told me you would try to talk me out of it and things like this. [00:20:41] And Snyder's interpretation was that Oswald had been coached by somebody to do this. [00:20:46] Now, there's no, I mean, there's no other evidence in the record anywhere that he told anybody about this or that anybody would have had any insider info about the embassy that would have told him to do this. [00:20:57] So what's going on here? [00:20:58] Who instructed Oswald to do this? [00:21:00] Who gave him this? [00:21:01] Snyder talks about how it seemed very prepared and that Oswald was basically reading from a prepared script, not literally, but that he had memorized exactly what he said. [00:21:09] It came in like sort of spoke in like a stilted way. [00:21:11] That's really what I'm saying. [00:21:12] Yeah, that it was a, and so like you said, it was a performance of sorts. [00:21:17] And, you know, there are theories about why that happened. [00:21:20] But it does seem like some kind of intelligence operation that Oswald was involved in there. [00:21:26] And the huge piece of evidence for that is, you know, my favorite thing, which is document routing and who reads what documents. [00:21:35] So, you know, ostensibly, like this guy who's a Marine goes to the Soviet Union, like there's a whole department in the CIA, a whole division that is supposed to have all that, get all the info about that, the Soviet Russia division. [00:21:49] They're supposed to, you know, so like you were saying, Aaron, there was a newspaper article. [00:21:54] I think the first one was an Elaine Mosby article that came out the next day. [00:21:58] So Oswald defected on October 31st, 1959. [00:22:02] The first article came out the next day. [00:22:04] So if you work in the Soviet Russia division, you're probably reading the Washington Post, which is where this article appeared. [00:22:10] So you would read that article and be like, oh, like this person defected. [00:22:13] And the article talked about his military background. [00:22:17] It didn't mention some of the things that later that Snyder talked about, like the fact that he was going to offer these secrets. [00:22:22] It doesn't have that stuff because it came from an interview that she did with Oswald. [00:22:26] So it didn't have the juiciest stuff. [00:22:29] It was a bulletin. [00:22:30] Yeah, it was very, yeah, exactly. [00:22:32] It was like a very, it was a relatively short article and it didn't include all the details. [00:22:37] But now, if you're in the Soviet Russia division, you'd be expecting that the State Department just met with this guy. [00:22:45] They're presumably going to give us a debrief about what happened. [00:22:48] And they never see any of that paperwork. [00:22:50] It all gets routed to two other offices in the CIA. [00:22:57] One of them is James Angleton's, the famous James Engleton's counterintelligence unit, and the Office of Security. [00:23:04] And specifically, it gets routed to the mole hunting units within both of those departments. [00:23:10] So the CIA had basically two, maybe I'll explain what a mole is if people are. [00:23:15] I was about to say, yeah, which is certainly Angleton was very familiar with. [00:23:20] Yeah, exactly. [00:23:21] But what's a mole in this context? [00:23:23] So a mole is someone who purports to work for one intelligence agency, and in reality they're relaying things back. [00:23:31] So one of the more famous moles that's directly related to this is this guy, Peter Popov. [00:23:37] He was a KGB, I can't remember exactly his rank, but he was a fairly high-ranking KGB guy who lived in Moscow and he became a CIA mole. [00:23:46] So from 1952 until he was caught in 1959, actually he got caught, well, he got arrested, I think the day that Oswald came to Russia. [00:24:00] So very fortuitous coincidence there. [00:24:02] But he was a KGB, you know, he was a KGB officer that's relaying things back to the CIA over a period of about six years. [00:24:12] And one of the things that he revealed was that he overheard one of his colleagues talking about the U-2 program. [00:24:21] And apparently the Soviet Union had somehow gotten details about the U-2 program from a mole that this person had in the CIA. [00:24:29] So Popov tells Angleton this. [00:24:32] He tells the CIA about this. [00:24:35] And I think that is what triggers, and that's like Jefferson Morley has written about this and John Newman has written about this. [00:24:42] That seems to be what triggers Oswald's trip to the USSR because you want to figure out what exactly do they know, right? [00:24:52] Popov overhears one statement, but what exactly do they know? [00:24:55] What details do they know? [00:24:57] Let's go do some kind of counterintelligence operation. [00:25:00] So it would explain the otherwise very strange thing, which is for some reason, this is the first time Oswald ever comes on the CIA's radar, and yet for some reason, almost all of the documents related to him go to the mole hunting units in the CIA. [00:25:15] How can you explain that? [00:25:16] Why does that make sense? [00:25:18] The most reasonable explanation, given the documents that exist, is he was a part of some kind of mole hunting operation in some way. [00:25:26] I recently talked to Jim DiEgenio about this, and he came up with some new research, or he pointed me to some of it. [00:25:35] And a woman who was working for the HSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 70s, the group that reinvestigated the assassination, there was this woman named Betsy Wolf, and she was given the task of looking at Oswald's CIA file and doing a write-up on it. [00:25:52] Now, she was very diligent and seems to be pretty smart and a dogged researcher, judging by what she was able to put together. [00:26:02] Now, there was no transcript of this, and it was classified and hidden away for a long time. [00:26:07] But there were handwritten things that she had. [00:26:10] Everything was handwritten. [00:26:12] And she was puzzled by the fact that there wasn't a 201 file on Oswald that should have been created very early on while he's doing all these crazy things. [00:26:22] Helms himself, when he learned of the date, so the 201 file is like what the normal file you would expect to see, right? [00:26:29] Like when somebody like Oswald defects, you would normally expect to see a 2015 film. [00:26:32] So they would open up a 201 file. [00:26:33] Yeah, that the Soviet Russian division would open up a 201. [00:26:36] Or if you did way less, even way less provocative things than that, you would get a 201 file. === Oswald's Missing 201 File (08:17) === [00:26:40] Absolutely. [00:26:41] But it was not opened until. [00:26:43] So he did that on October 31st of 1959. [00:26:47] I think the 201 file was not open until December of the next year, if I recall correctly. [00:26:50] Of 1960. [00:26:51] Of 1960, yeah. [00:26:52] And when Richard Helms was told this, he didn't know this. [00:26:55] When he was told this, his reaction was, this is incredible. [00:26:58] Like, is that really true? [00:26:59] I actually can't believe that. [00:27:00] Which I kind of buy that he didn't know about this, any of this. [00:27:04] But it just shows, like, you know, I mean, Richard Helms obviously is someone who understands normal procedure with respects to, you know, how these things get done. [00:27:12] And he was very surprised by this fact. [00:27:15] Yeah, I think that part of the mystery here also is part of the mystery of why more stuff didn't come out during the Family Jewels era of Watergate, when Richard Nixon tried to get his own CIA director to dig up as much dirt on the CIA as possible. [00:27:30] For safekeeping. [00:27:31] For, yes. [00:27:33] I mean, what really happened was that Schlesinger saw all the connections between the CIA and the burglars and was like, what the hell is going on here? [00:27:42] The CIA, they basically had come to the conclusion that the CIA was behind all of this Watergate bullshit, which is how Nixon would have perceived it. [00:27:51] I mean, Nixon committed lots of crimes, yada, yada. [00:27:53] But the point is, the Family Jewels, they didn't really turn up a whole lot of very explosive things. [00:27:59] And I think that the reason for that is related to what happens with Oswald's files here. [00:28:04] It's that the Office of Security was doing that mole hunt, and they are kind of the inner sanctum of the inner sanctum of the CIA. [00:28:10] They're the group that handles like sexual blackmail, probably counter, counterintelligence. [00:28:17] Well, you guys have done a considerable amount of work on this subject. [00:28:21] We all have. [00:28:21] I don't know why you're talking about it. [00:28:22] Well, it's a little bit weird to be the only female. [00:28:26] Because you're sexually blackmailing me, Brace. [00:28:28] That's why. [00:28:29] We know this and this is the same thing. [00:28:30] So you're saying it was pour dawned off specifically so far away that really, I mean, even concentric circles of departments wouldn't be able to access it. [00:28:39] Yes, and I think that this actually gets into the key of some of the worst secrets of the U.S. is that there is a level of secrecy that is like, it's like really high. [00:28:53] You really did not get access to that. [00:28:56] As evidenced by there's a transcript of Richard Nixon trying to argue with Richard Helms about secrets related to the Kennedy assassination. [00:29:03] He's making these arguments like, well, how is this supposed to work? [00:29:05] The president comes in and doesn't even know what the last administration was doing and this doesn't seem right, whatever. [00:29:10] And he still walked away empty-handed. [00:29:12] The president did. [00:29:13] So what happens with this woman, Betsy Wolfe, when she is analyzing these files, she finds someone named, he's got a great name, Dick Gambino. [00:29:24] I feel like everyone, by the way, in this entire case, everyone is somehow named Dick Gambino, even when they're not named. [00:29:31] Literally, the other two people he just mentioned, also, I mean, Richard Nixon and Richard Helms. [00:29:37] Dick Nixon. [00:29:38] Dick Helms. [00:29:39] Yeah. [00:29:40] Yeah. [00:29:40] It's a tale of many dicks. [00:29:42] And Richard. [00:29:43] This guy was not as bad because he actually explained it to her. [00:29:47] He was saying, like, look, it doesn't matter. [00:29:50] It doesn't matter how the file is. [00:29:54] What's most important is that the file can get routed somewhere so it'll always come to this place. [00:30:00] So that's why you can't find these things. [00:30:02] It's probably because they were immediately routed to the Office of Security. [00:30:06] And he didn't know why that was the case or anything else about it. [00:30:09] But we can extrapolate or whatever. [00:30:12] We can understand that it's a black hole of sorts. [00:30:16] And so that was the fact that Oswald was being used in a mole hunt like this made him the perfect person because all of his files were managed in a particular way or the vast majority of them. [00:30:27] And so this is why he was able to be manipulated in this way quite easily. [00:30:31] And the fact that they found this woman and her work and it was hidden away forever and never written up, I mean, that's it's pretty remarkable that she had so diligently looked at this. [00:30:42] And it's, you know, this is the mystery of what happened to Oswald is likely somewhere in the Office of Security. [00:30:50] And I would bet that they still have a lot of that stuff today because they do scrub things. [00:30:56] I don't think they obviously don't release everything. [00:30:58] They probably get rid of some documents, but they also have to keep them in a sense to know what they need to cover up in the future. [00:31:05] So I don't think that they do everything orally and then everything's totally off the books. [00:31:10] I think they actually have to have some way of making sure they know what crimes they need to keep covering up because they're a pretty big criminal organization and they'll lose track of all the crimes they're constantly committing if they don't. [00:31:20] I would. [00:31:21] I want to put it into context a little bit more for our listeners too, is that the moles were a hugely important part of Cold War spy games. [00:31:32] And the USSR was significantly more sophisticated in a lot of that we know of. [00:31:39] I mean, obviously we don't have a ton of insight or at least as much insight as we'd like on either the CIA or the KGBs or whatever related intelligence agencies during the Cold War as we might like. [00:31:51] But the USSR was pretty adept at putting moles or even just giving the impression that maybe somebody who wasn't a mole, a real defector might be a mole, et cetera, in the CIA, which obviously very famously caused Engleton to go insane or maybe he's the mole. [00:32:09] And they were able to put their, like, for instance, Kim Philby was a mole hunter. [00:32:15] Yes, exactly. [00:32:16] He was basically Angleton's counterpart at MI6. [00:32:18] And he was, I mean, he was like a KGB guy from his days at Cambridge. [00:32:23] Yeah. [00:32:24] And he managed to, I mean, there was, they were never going to find, you know, it took them an extremely long time to find him because he was extremely well placed. [00:32:33] Yeah. [00:32:34] And Newman thinks John Newman, who's written about Popov and, you know, whatever source it was that Popov identified that told the KGB about the U-2 program, you know, that person was never ultimately found. [00:32:52] And so whatever, you know, whatever mole hunt they were doing to try to find, you know, Newman has theories about who it might have been, but as far as the CIA was concerned at the time, you know, they never found that person. [00:33:04] And presumably that person was able to continue to pass secrets to the KGB throughout the Cold War, or at least until they retired. [00:33:12] So yeah, it seems like a pretty, you know, pretty devastating thing, especially when you consider that Oswald defected on Halloween of 1959. [00:33:24] And then there were two U-2 flights after that. [00:33:27] The first one after that went off without a hitch, and then the second one after that was Gary Powers getting shot down in May of 1960. [00:33:34] Also went off without a hitch. [00:33:35] Yeah, exactly. [00:33:37] Exactly. [00:33:38] Yeah. [00:33:38] He blamed Oswald too. [00:33:40] Peter Powers did at certain points. [00:33:41] He was like, is that little Oswald? [00:33:42] I read an interview with his son, though, where his son's like, I don't know if it was like that. [00:33:46] I mean, I'm like, he's like, I don't know, I really blame Oswald for it. [00:33:49] Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, there's definitely a lot of weirdness around the Gary Powers shoot down, but I think that it's at least plausible to connect the two or that or that someone would want it to appear that the two were connected. [00:34:02] I think that's very plausible. [00:34:03] And like you said, yeah, Powers, because specifically the issue was the height at which the U-2 flies, which was like one of the most important parts of how it avoided getting shot down, and then also one of the most closely held things about it. [00:34:17] And it's also very possible that that information came from the mole that Popov was talking about because that is supposedly what the CIA mole told the KGB about the U-2 was all the technical details about it. [00:34:30] So yeah, identifying who that was, you know, the U-2 being such a crucial part of the U.S. surveillance at that point, finding out who that person was was pretty crucial. [00:34:39] And it seems like, you know, it certainly seems like Oswald was involved in that based on the fact that all these files on him were going to the mole hunting units and not the places you would expect them to. === Oswald's Mysterious Return (02:00) === [00:34:58] That gets into what Oswald was basically doing when he comes back because it seems that while he's there performing in the embassy saying, I am a defector and I'm going to give you state secrets. [00:35:13] My name is Lee Harvey Oswald. [00:35:15] Here's how you spell it. [00:35:16] I mean, when he comes back, he is similarly acting in a really, he's drawing a lot of attention to himself as a communist without doing much effective communist organizing. [00:35:27] Well, all right. [00:35:28] From my experience with many communists, that's not so unusual. [00:35:34] I mean, he sort of like repeats this later on. [00:35:36] He's very good at like making a scene and making a very like, hey, I remember that guy. [00:35:43] He's like really good at being that guy that you're going to remember because the scene he creates is so over the top. [00:35:49] Being photographed in New Orleans. [00:35:51] Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking. [00:35:52] But it's like he's the guy he's going to have like props on him. [00:35:54] He's like going to knock over a bookcase on his way out. [00:35:57] He's wearing a giant sandwich board that says like Viva Fidel and stuff like that. [00:36:01] He's going to slip and then open his briefcase and all these like gummy worms are going to fall out and he's going to be a little bit more. [00:36:06] There actually was an instant where he's like holding a giant stack of Fair Play for Cuba committee flyers and like he gets like beat up and they just scatter everywhere. [00:36:15] Yes. [00:36:15] So it's just his name. [00:36:16] Exactly. [00:36:17] It's just his name and that I'm I love Cuba. [00:36:20] Yeah. [00:36:20] And it's just they're just spread all over the place on the streets of New Orleans. [00:36:24] Yeah, he's really, really good at getting all the evidence in order. [00:36:30] Yeah, it's totally true. [00:36:31] Because yeah, when he comes back from the Soviet Union, which there's a the way that he, the way that he, you know, got back to the U.S. is very strange. [00:36:46] You know, I mean, to not even get into any of his escapades in Russia where it seems like he was being surveilled. [00:36:52] It seems possible that Marina was originally some kind of intelligence asset. [00:36:56] Yeah, Marina. [00:36:57] I mean, Marina Oswald. === Oswald's Strange Return (15:49) === [00:36:58] From what I know about the KGB and the way they operated, I would be shocked if she was in. [00:37:06] And from what I know about female counterparts, they're very often assets. [00:37:13] Yeah, there was a CIA. [00:37:19] I can't remember what his cryptonym was, but he did tell, he did tell, you know, he was another mole. [00:37:27] He was a KGB guy. [00:37:31] He had trained in Minsk, which was the city where Oswald was. [00:37:35] And that's what he told the CIA, was that Marina was what he called a swallow, which is basically a way that intelligence agencies would use women to get men into bed and basically infiltrate their lives in that way. [00:37:49] I'm hoping that's a reference to the bird because I think that it is, but it's also awful. [00:37:53] Yeah. [00:37:55] That's something different in Russian. [00:37:57] Yeah, right. [00:37:57] Whatever the Russian word for that is. [00:37:59] I doubt it's, yeah. [00:38:01] And but his, his, what this, what this mole told the CIA was that, you know, basically she mostly wanted to get to the U.S. and get out of the Soviet Union and that she stopped being useful to them at that point, which is, you know, she still, I don't know, like when Oswald comes back, he's sending letters to the, he literally like wrote, and you have to know, right, like everything that goes to the Soviet embassy is read by the FBI. [00:38:25] Yes. [00:38:25] Like they're opening every single letter. [00:38:27] And if you're a halfway intelligent person, you're going to understand that that's the case because obviously that's the case. [00:38:35] And so he's like, he writes a letter to the Soviet embassy asking them for recommendations of left-wing bookstores where he can get, this is literally what he did. [00:38:46] And he asked for, you know, can you recommend to me left-wing bookstores where I will be able to get subscriptions to subversive material? [00:38:53] Like, that's literally what he's. [00:38:54] He wrote subversive materials. [00:38:55] I don't think he used the word subversive material, but he names left-wing and also like international publisher. [00:39:01] He was asking for the CPUSA and the Socialist Worker Party, which, you know, is like a little bit pick one, right? [00:39:07] This is, yeah, well, this is the, this has always struck to me as one of the funniest things about the Oswald's case, I guess you could say, is that like he was at at the same time as he was just like such a sort of bog standard, like, I am a communist, and like he moves to the Soviet Union in 1959. [00:39:28] Right. [00:39:30] He also is like, you know, he's photographed famously in the backyard with Trotskyist newspapers. [00:39:35] And like one Trotskyist and then one. [00:39:37] Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:39:38] Which is even weirder. [00:39:40] Listen, I'm not going to say that I've never read a Trotskyist newspaper in my life. [00:39:44] In fact, they're kind of the only guys with newspapers. [00:39:47] They kind of just end up in your hands. [00:39:50] They do. [00:39:50] They do. [00:39:51] Or sometimes they come to a work party you have and give one to you. [00:39:56] The Spartacus. [00:39:58] And lectured us. [00:40:01] But that's always been the strangest thing is that he's just like, yeah, I just like communism. [00:40:07] Like, I like all of it. [00:40:09] Especially given like he, the reason he told everybody he wanted to come back is that he had become disillusioned. [00:40:15] Exactly. [00:40:15] Yeah. [00:40:16] Having lived in the Soviet Union. [00:40:17] That's what he told everybody. [00:40:18] So for him to then come back and say, actually, he seems even more hardcore about it after he came back than before he went, which is totally contrary to the stated reasons he gave for why he came back to the U.S. in the first place. [00:40:34] So it just, yeah, it doesn't really, it does not really line up. [00:40:38] I mean, it seems to me like there was an alternative, you know, there was a need for him and he wasn't useful. [00:40:45] Because basically what ultimately happens as far as his role in that U2 mole hunt is, you know, I assume everybody in the Soviet Russia division was like, okay, you know, we're not getting any documents about Oswald. [00:40:57] So clearly something's going on here. [00:40:59] Yeah. [00:41:00] He's used by another level. [00:41:02] We're just not going to touch this guy. [00:41:03] He's clearly radioactive. [00:41:04] Because the intention would be somebody, the KGB mole at the CIA, starts asking about Oswald. [00:41:11] And when somebody starts asking about Oswald, you start to get a sense that, okay, this is at least a candidate for the mole, but that never happened. [00:41:19] And this is, I mean, Ben, what you're describing, like, is a textbook case of how things went down at the CIA. [00:41:27] It's like they would sort of put out these people as bait and see who gets picked up and asked about. [00:41:34] Yeah, and both sides use false defectors all the time to spread false information. [00:41:37] I mean, there's a famous false defector in this case, Yurino Shenko, who came to the U.S. and was alleged to be a KGB defector and spread all kinds of lies. [00:41:51] And in particular, told the CIA that the KGB knew nothing about Oswald, had no interest in him at all, which is obviously not true, especially now that we know they were intercepting his mail over there. [00:42:04] They had all kinds of people, as well as you have the other defectors that I mentioned, other moles who talked about Marina's role in surveilling him. [00:42:13] So it's, yeah, that technique of false defectors, this kind of fly paper thing that Oswald did to try to smoke out whoever the mole was in the CIA. [00:42:27] But when it didn't work out and he's just hanging out in Russia, collecting like a huge paycheck, by the way, he had a beautiful apartment overlooking the river in Minsk. [00:42:39] He was getting, in addition to his factory job, he was like getting double, he was getting that much income again from the Soviet state, effectively. [00:42:49] So I think he was pretty clearly, they knew something was up with him and they wanted to see what was going on and surveil him. [00:42:56] But yeah, then he comes back to the U.S. and almost immediately gets involved in Cuba stuff and the Fair Play for Cuba committee, which, again, for somebody who was ostensibly now disillusioned with communism is a very strange arc to take. [00:43:16] So it's, again, it's one of the, and when you start to look at, again, how documents and things got routed and who knew what about that, again, it starts to look like some kind of counterintelligence operation. [00:43:35] Yeah, the fair play for Cuba committee angle is a huge part of some of these other assassination stories and the figures around Oswald. [00:43:44] I mean, that seems to be the way to tie him to make him look like he's a communist connected to Fidel. [00:43:52] And it raises questions as to what was really supposed to happen with the assassination because him getting killed the way that he was in jail, that doesn't seem like that was really the plan to have a local concerned pimp come in and shoot him. [00:44:07] That wouldn't be how you would draw it up. [00:44:11] And then other people around him and other people that were involved in plots with JFK, I mean, there was one that was supposed to happen in Tampa with this guy, Gilberto Lopez, and he had been involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, just like Oswald. [00:44:26] And this was a plot that I think it's, the president maybe changes his route or so. [00:44:31] For whatever reason, it doesn't get, it is not, it doesn't come to pass that he's shot at in Tampa or anything. [00:44:39] But what is interesting about this Gilberto Lopez guy is not just that he was involved with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, but that he ends up being in Dallas-Fort Worth on the weekend of the 22nd. [00:44:52] And also afterwards, he goes to Mexico City and from there flies to Cuba, just as Oswald was sort of trying to do supposedly, or somebody impersonating Oswald was doing in Mexico City. [00:45:05] So this is really fascinating. [00:45:07] And the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was one of those operations that was illegal for the CIA to be doing, but they were still working on trying to undermine it domestically, which they're not supposed to do. [00:45:20] And one of the people working on that was James McCord, the notorious Watergate burglar, the guy who in 1953 was tasked with covering up the Frank Olson murder, like a really big operator in terms of the, in the Office of Security, which is again the inner sanctum of the CIA where all the worst secrets are kept. [00:45:40] So that aspect of it is, I mean, it just seems clearly to be in New Orleans, especially, that Oswald was there as an intelligence operative to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee on some kind of COINTEL pro operation type of operation, except likely run by the CIA illegally. [00:46:01] But I mean, the FBI would get involved with those things too at certain points. [00:46:05] And then they would subcontract them out to goons like Guy Bannister in New Orleans. [00:46:10] And that seems to be pretty clearly what Oswald was doing in New Orleans with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. [00:46:16] It doesn't make any sense to be an organizer the way he was. [00:46:18] And he was working out of the office of a right-wing anti-communist fanatic with enormous files on subversives. [00:46:25] It's absurdly suspicious. [00:46:26] I mean, it isn't even suspicious. [00:46:28] The 544 Camp Street address. [00:46:31] It's so strange. [00:46:31] Yeah, can you explain to our listeners what's up with that? [00:46:34] Because it is such a weird, like, keep in mind that Oswald is in New Orleans. [00:46:38] And listen, I cannot fault the Harvey Oswald for wanting to spend maybe 1960 in New Orleans, maybe rather than Minsk, because I'll tell you which one I'd prefer. [00:46:50] But he goes down there and he's like, I'm going to become this like Cuba, pro-Cuba activist. [00:46:56] And he ends up having this office. [00:46:59] And yeah, where is it? [00:47:00] Yeah, so yeah. [00:47:01] So, like you said, he goes, so in April of 1963, he moves to New Orleans and he's going to start a charter branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. [00:47:10] He has all these letters with Vincent Lee, who was running the Fair Play for Cuba Committee out of New York. [00:47:15] And this was just, I mean, it's what it sounds like. [00:47:17] It was basically a pro-Cuba, or at least an anti-anti-Cuba front organization, basically, for a lot of left-wing groups, which there were some interesting political battles inside the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. [00:47:31] But in any case, Oswald goes to New Orleans and he immediately starts passing out these flyers. [00:47:39] And some of the flyers have this address, 544 Camp Street, which happens to be the address of Guy Bannister that Aaron just mentioned, who was this former FBI G-Man who was now running a nominally private anti-Castro Cuban exile organization in New Orleans. [00:48:00] So what an incredible coincidence that Oswald goes to Cuba to start a new Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter, and the address that he puts on, at least some of the flyers that he's handing out, happens to be the address of a right-wing, anti-Castro private contractor organizer who's doing this for the FBI and CIA off the books. [00:48:26] And he's pretty much the only member of Fair Play for Cuba. [00:48:29] Yeah, it's just him. [00:48:30] He lied about A.J. Hidel, which was his alter ego. [00:48:34] And he had a membership card that was signed by A.J. Hidel. [00:48:38] So he was signing his own membership card and making it appear. [00:48:43] He was interviewed by the FBI a number of times, and he would just lie about having meetings at different people's houses. [00:48:49] It seems like he had an interest in Tulane. [00:48:53] He wanted to make it seem as though he was working with Tulane professors who were already targets of both the local police intelligence unit as well as the FBI in New Orleans. [00:49:05] And he seemed to be framing it up that he was involved with them. [00:49:09] And he would even leave flyers near locations where some of these Tulane professors lived, like on Pine Street in New Orleans, he would leave these flyers, or near the Tulane campus, he would leave these flyers with his name and address. [00:49:22] So he seemed to be framing it up that he had these relations with these Tulane professors, which again, like Aaron was saying, would make sense if his job was to be this crazy guy who discredits the Fair Play for Cuba committee. [00:49:35] You know, he also does some other bizarre. [00:49:38] So, first off, like, even just the, like, even if Oswald somehow, how did he even know the 544 Camp Street address is just weird. [00:49:46] But then, also, how does he know who Carlos Brunier is? [00:49:49] So Carlos Brunier or Brunier, I'm sorry, my Cajun name pronunciation is not at the snop. [00:49:55] It's okay. [00:49:55] It's been about time since we've been in the swamp together. [00:49:57] Yeah, that's exactly right. [00:50:00] And Brunier led this group called the DRE or the Revolutionary Student Directorate, which was this anti-Castro Cuban exile organization that was run by the CIA. [00:50:13] And Castro walks into a store that Brunier owns and finds Brunier and tells him that he wants to start an anti-Castro militant militia. [00:50:25] He talks about, I used to be a Marine and I'm going to help you let's form up an anti-Castro militia. [00:50:32] And Brunier apparently was like, this guy's either a Fed or a communist. [00:50:36] Like this is obviously. [00:50:37] What if he's both? [00:50:38] Exactly. [00:50:39] I don't think Brunier considered that possibility. [00:50:42] But so that happens on October 6th of 1963, again, just like six weeks or so, you know, before the assassination. [00:50:49] Three days later, Brunier and a couple of his friends find Oswald on Canal Street handing out Fair Play for Cuba committee flyers and standing there with a sandwich board that says like Viva Fidel hands off Cuba. [00:51:01] So they get into a fight with him. [00:51:02] And this is like you talk about like Liz, like starting a scene, creating a commotion. [00:51:08] Oswald seems to want to get punched. [00:51:10] Like he seems to want to get into a fight with these guys, certainly as soon as he sees them. [00:51:17] And obviously they're like, you just came to us three days ago and said you wanted to start an anti-Castro organization. [00:51:25] And yet here you are, here you are flyering for Fidel. [00:51:30] So Oswald gets arrested as a part of that. [00:51:33] Which it also seems like he's trying to do. [00:51:35] Yeah, exactly. [00:51:36] And it generates these documents in the F, you know, the FBI interviews him and asks him about this stuff. [00:51:42] And, you know, the CIA has a very tight hold on those documents. [00:51:45] They don't get where you would expect them to go. [00:51:49] And then the biggest thing that happens with Brunier is that Oswald does this. [00:51:56] He did several radio debates. [00:51:57] He was like very into going on like college radio and local radio. [00:52:02] He was a streamer. [00:52:03] Yeah, he was like, he was a content creator and he was trying to find his audience. [00:52:08] So he would go and do these debates on the radio, again, like trying to get his name out there as being associated with the FPCC. [00:52:17] And in one of these, so this one happened. [00:52:21] I'm sorry, the incident where he goes to the store, that's August 5th. [00:52:25] I said that was in October. [00:52:26] That was August 5th. [00:52:28] And then the Canal Street thing where he gets into this fight with Brunier, that's on August 9th. [00:52:33] So he gets bailed out, he gets out of jail, and then on August 21st, he does this radio debate with a couple of guys in Brunier and some other people are there as well. [00:52:41] And somehow these people all know about his defection to the USSR. === Cuban Division Access Controversy (08:52) === [00:52:48] And they bring this up like during this debate. [00:52:51] The classic. [00:52:52] It's an ad hominem, sir. [00:52:54] Yeah, I mean, that's basically what Oswald is. [00:52:55] That's when you do your research online about your opponent. [00:52:58] But that's the thing, is like at this time, like, yeah, there were newspaper articles about it, but to find that stuff, like, are really these guys going and finding the microfiche? [00:53:07] Like, are they going to their local library and going to the newspaper archives and like poring over stuff? [00:53:11] Like, they're obviously not doing that. [00:53:13] Somebody told them about this. [00:53:14] Yes. [00:53:14] And obviously, the most likely explanation for who told them this would be Brunier in the DRE being a CIA asset. [00:53:24] Well, even more than that, the radio show where they were on was run by this guy, Ed Butler, who was head of the Information Council in the Americas, which was Inca, right? [00:53:35] And that was a CIA. [00:53:36] I mean, they were funded by the CIA. [00:53:38] So it could have come from ZRE and Brigniere's posse, or it could have come from Ed Butler and the Inca people. [00:53:44] But it was definitely not something you would have known unless he was some sort of savant who has a perfect memory of like newspaper clippings. [00:53:53] And he's the Washington Post, apparently, or whatever. [00:53:55] Religiously. [00:53:56] Yeah. [00:53:56] I have a question because, so what did like, how much was the CIA and the FBI tracking Oswald like up to and prior to New Orleans? [00:54:08] Yeah, that's a great question. [00:54:09] So because he's in Dallas, so he starts his Fair Play for Cuba Committee stuff in Dallas. [00:54:13] Yeah. [00:54:13] And then that's when he gets in touch with Vincent Lee, who was leading the FPCC and says, I want to start this. [00:54:19] I want to start this branch. [00:54:20] They told him not to, by the way. [00:54:21] Yeah, which they told him not to. [00:54:22] It was a bunch of right-wing crazy. [00:54:24] Yeah, exactly. [00:54:24] He was like, I want to do it. [00:54:25] They were like, don't, don't, they were literally like, don't get an office because you're going to get targeted. [00:54:30] You'll get fired. [00:54:32] Think about it this way. [00:54:32] Maybe he was like, he took that advice and then he put his enemy's office as the address in the hopes they would get firebombed. [00:54:40] Yeah. [00:54:40] Who mulls the mole? [00:54:42] Who mulls the mole? [00:54:43] Yeah. [00:54:43] So there are, there are, I mean, I can just mention. [00:54:47] So this is another, this time in New Orleans is another period where there were a lot of documents being produced about Oswald, but none of it was making it into his main file, like his main 201 file. [00:55:00] So, you know, basically, if you were just somebody in the Soviet Russia division or really anybody in the CIA and you went to go look up Oswald, like you wouldn't find any of these reports. [00:55:13] So for instance, there was a memo that was written by this FBI, a special agent hostie in Dallas, and he also knew about some of the basic details of New Orleans. [00:55:24] That memo never makes it into Oswald's 201 file. [00:55:29] None of the information that, because even if Brunier was not the source of Oswald's defection information coming to that radio interview, he certainly heard that. [00:55:40] Whoever else knew about it, he was there and heard about it. [00:55:44] And all, like, you know, again, Brunier was being handled by, and the whole organization was being handled by this CIA officer, George Joanides, who is, you know, is famous for some other exploits as well, specifically relating to the cover-up of all of this. [00:56:01] But conveniently, there's the 17-month period where Joanites, which included this period, where Joanites was handling the DRE. [00:56:09] There's just a giant blank spot and all of the monthly reports about here's what the DRE has been doing lately are just gone. [00:56:15] There's not in the archive anywhere. [00:56:18] And so why was this information about Brunier not making it to the rest of the CIA? [00:56:24] It was clearly being very closely held by the Cuban Affairs, the SAS department of the CIA, which is corroborated by the fact that one of Angleton's people, Jane Roman, [00:56:42] this memo goes out on October 10th that is going to inform the Mexico City, we'll get to Oswald and Mexico City and all of that in a second, but one of the things that happened was the CIA headquarters was going to give Mexico City a memo with everything they knew. [00:56:56] Because remember, this is at a time when the Oswald file was a physical file located in headquarters. [00:57:02] So for Mexico City to find out about it, they'd have to get a memo about what's going on. [00:57:06] So this woman, Jane Roman, a bunch of people, in fact, the assistant director for plans is one of the authors on it. [00:57:17] So it's a pretty senior level memo that's getting written about Oswald, which again, this was before the assassination. [00:57:21] Why is there such high-level attention on Oswald during the weeks leading up to the assassination? [00:57:27] But she signs off on this memo saying the last information that the CIA has about Oswald was May 1962, which is while he was still in the Soviet Union. [00:57:35] And she personally had read FBI documents about Oswald's activities in Dallas and New Orleans. [00:57:41] And so they just lied to the Mexico City office and said, oh, we don't, last thing we have is 1962. [00:57:48] We don't know anything about Fair Play for Cuba. [00:57:49] We don't know about any of his altercations with Brunier. [00:57:52] And she said about that, when she was interviewed by John Newman and Jefferson Morley in the 90s, she claimed to not remember what happened. [00:58:03] But when they showed her her signature and showed her these documents, her explanation was, this is me on October 10th knowingly signing off on something I know is not true. [00:58:14] That's what she said. [00:58:16] And she says, the only interpretation I could put on this would be that this SAS group, which is the Cuba Affairs Department of the CIA, would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control. [00:58:26] So if you did a routine check, if you were just some random person in the CIA looking this up, it wouldn't show up in his 201 file. [00:58:32] She goes on to say it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on a need-to-know basis. [00:58:37] So that SAS that she's saying has a tight hold on this information is the same group that's running Bernier and the DRE. [00:58:44] So again, all of this, all of the, where these documents were and who was holding onto them, again, it seems indicative that there was some kind of, you know, like Aaron put it, an operation to discredit the FPCC that was being run by Cuban affairs and that Oswald was some kind of asset in all of that, whether he knew it or not. [00:59:04] It seems like certainly he was treated that way by the CIA, Cuban Affairs Division. [00:59:09] Well, her explanation also mirrors Helms' surprise in a lot of ways because they're both saying the same thing, which is, oh, this wasn't handled how it was supposed to be. [00:59:19] Yeah, exactly. [00:59:19] Exactly. [00:59:20] In her case, she's saying, like, I participated in doing that. [00:59:24] Like, I was the one who concealed this information from Mexico City, which would have been very relevant for them to know, given what he was doing there. [00:59:33] The other thing which I didn't mention earlier, which I think is relevant as you bring up the Cuban division, which should have been given some access to some of these files, is that when Oswald, when they were routing his files to the Office of Security, they weren't ending up in the Soviet division. [00:59:50] That was where they should have gone because he was somebody who had defected the Soviet Union. [00:59:54] So they were, whatever their concern with Oswald was, it was not apparently his connections to the Soviet Union where he had defected. [01:00:03] And so that's just more the fact that they were not kept appraised of what Oswald was up to while he was over there. [01:00:09] And then we've talked about Ottawa Tepka in the past, that State Department person who was trying to figure out who was and was not a false defector. [01:00:17] And he was basically run out of the State Department because of that, because he was very persistent. [01:00:22] It all just points to Oswald being a pawn of the CIA in some sort of game that they were playing. [01:00:28] Because if it was legitimate intelligence gathering about Oswald, the first thing you would expect is like he's like the reason you would pay attention to him is he's a KGB spy. [01:00:37] He's come back from the U.S. There would be like that's what's so sort of astounding to me is that there was such, I mean, the real paranoia at the CIA sets in like later than this. [01:00:48] But still, like this was, this was, I mean, we're talking like they were still paranoid. [01:00:53] They were still, but it wasn't like, it wasn't like how it got after some notable disasters. [01:01:01] But it just, it's really like they seem to not even, according to the documents, consider the possibility, which, you know, I listen, my time at the agency was magical. [01:01:14] It was brief. [01:01:15] I met some really amazing people, some of whom let me down. [01:01:20] But I'm like, you know, I'm no expert on this stuff, but I'm like, wouldn't you be like, this guy might be a fucking spy? [01:01:26] Like, they might be like dipping him back. [01:01:29] But unless you already can like completely toss out that possibility. [01:01:33] Yeah, unless you already know, it's already know, that's the first time. [01:01:38] Yeah, like that's kind of the only explanation. === Part Two Coming Soon (01:49) === [01:01:40] Yeah yeah, and you know we we, you know, we. [01:01:42] We talked in a previous uh one of the Jfk 101 episodes about uh sort of his unofficial debriefings in in Dallas um, but really you'd think there would be like a systemic like or systematic um like full, actual debriefing of him after this. [01:02:03] I mean, George Demorenschild is as more officially debriefed on his trips out of the country than Oswald is after spending time as a defecting U.s marine in the in the USSR. [01:02:36] All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you're like, wait, I need to hear more about Lee Harvey Oswald. [01:02:41] Do we have something in store for you? [01:02:43] Which is our next episode after this one? [01:02:46] Yeah, there's a part two coming, more information, more stuff to talk about. [01:02:50] With that being said, we are joined, of course, by Ben Howard myself. [01:02:56] I'm Losing. [01:02:57] I'm Aaron Good. [01:02:59] That was Aaron Good. [01:03:01] And also, weirdly enough, producer Young Chomsky. [01:03:04] Because this has been Timber there. [01:03:06] True, Anon. [01:03:07] We'll see you next time. [01:03:08] Bye-bye. [01:03:28] Come out. [01:03:29] Come out.