True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 335: JFK 201 (Part 2)
Aired: 2023-11-20
Duration: 01:17:08


=== Hard-Hitting Paper Pushers Needed (02:12) ===

[00:00:00]  I was thinking about, you know, so in this episode that's coming up, we're going to talk about how, you know, they don't make CIA guys like they used to, which we've talked about on the show before.
[00:00:08]  But I was thinking about it too, is they don't make crank senators like they used to.
[00:00:14]  That is a good point, yeah.
[00:00:16]  Because I was thinking when we were talking, I was like, damn, we need like a crank senator who's just like, we need more documents, but who isn't like internet QAnon brained and like using it as another thing.
[00:00:27]  Like you need a really, really passionate document guy to be demanding the documents.
[00:00:31]  Yeah, there's no more Mike Cravelles anymore.
[00:00:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:33]  That type is just totally gone.
[00:00:35]  Like crank-friendly, but like with passion and integrity.
[00:00:39]  Yeah, I mean, immediately, well, you said QAnon, so she's out, but like, obviously Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to mind.
[00:00:46]  Fucking get her out of here.
[00:00:47]  But like, it's just a freak show.
[00:00:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:00:49]  Like, she's not actually interested in the documents.
[00:00:51]  Yeah.
[00:00:51]  No, they're all crazy internet-brained people.
[00:00:54]  We need some hard-hitting paper pushers.
[00:01:18]  You're heard it here, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:01:20]  That's what Liz wants in office, hard-hitting paper pushers.
[00:01:25]  Meanwhile, I'd settle for a few more women.
[00:01:29]  Hello, welcome to the show.
[00:01:31]  My name is Brace Belden.
[00:01:33]  I am, of course, joined by my beautiful, if genderly traitorious co-host.
[00:01:41]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:43]  And record scratch?
[00:01:48]  We also have with us in the studio.
[00:01:50]  Ben Howard.
[00:01:51]  Good to be here.
[00:01:52]  And who else?
[00:01:54]  I'm Aaron Good.
[00:01:56]  Aaron Good over there, of course, having to call in via the throat of Young Chomsky, which I also use to communicate with my desires.
[00:02:08]  And, of course, we are joined by the man himself, producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called?

=== Fucked-Up Casting Call (03:50) ===

[00:02:12]  It's called True Anon.
[00:02:14]  Hello.
[00:02:14]  Hello.
[00:02:15]  What a fucking casting call that was.
[00:02:18]  What a casting call.
[00:02:19]  That was.
[00:02:20]  What a casting call that was.
[00:02:22]  I think I could act.
[00:02:24]  You act every day.
[00:02:25]  Act a fool.
[00:02:26]  I act out.
[00:02:27]  I'm bad.
[00:02:28]  No, I think I could be an Othello.
[00:02:31]  But that's neither here nor there.
[00:02:32]  That's in the future.
[00:02:34]  So we are back with JFK 201 part two.
[00:02:41]  They never really did come up with a good name to number podcast episodes.
[00:02:45]  What do you mean?
[00:02:46]  It's just a number.
[00:02:47]  They.
[00:02:48]  They.
[00:02:51]  Yeah, I know, but there's two twos in this and a one and a O.
[00:02:55]  But what are the things that are?
[00:02:57]  You know what, though?
[00:02:57]  Though our listeners are smart enough to figure it out.
[00:03:00]  Uh-huh.
[00:03:00]  And I can tell you when I get to the interview.
[00:03:02]  Ben, what are we talking about today?
[00:03:03]  Talking about documents.
[00:03:04]  You know, we're talking about reams of documents.
[00:03:06]  You should be printing everything, all of the documents that were printed and not printed, especially having to do with various hanky-panky that was going on in New Orleans and in Mexico City.
[00:03:17]  I just love those cities.
[00:03:20]  There's always something about the southern charm of New Orleans and diving into more of what Lee Harvey Oswald was getting into and what kind of strange business he was up to and what people lied about.
[00:03:35]  And what they lied about on paper.
[00:03:38]  So, fry up that oyster, suffer some succotash, and head on down to New Orleans right now.
[00:04:01]  Um, hola, me llamo Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:04:07]  Is this the Cuban consulate?
[00:04:09]  Good, good.
[00:04:11]  You know, I was just down here in Ola, Mexico City for a couple of days, checking out the sites, and I was wondering, listen, I'm going to say something a little crazy right now.
[00:04:24]  What do you think would happen if I maybe shot El Presidente for using code words here of America of El America?
[00:04:35]  Oh, with a gun, and then I came to your conchario, Coopa.
[00:04:45]  Hello?
[00:04:48]  Welcome back.
[00:04:50]  JFK 102, part 2.
[00:04:53]  No.
[00:04:53]  No?
[00:04:54]  201, part 2.
[00:04:56]  Listen, I didn't go to, listen, the college I went to, the numbers were, you kind of just made up your own numbers.
[00:05:01]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:05:02]  I went to Evergreen.
[00:05:05]  Evergreen College should be closed.
[00:05:08]  Well, welcome to the show, independent researcher Ben Howard, political scientist and host of the American Exception podcast, Aaron Good.
[00:05:21]  Welcome here to sunny Mexico City, where we have fled during COVID so that we can work on our, what are they called, work-from-home jobs here in Mexico.
[00:05:32]  This is a lovely co-working space.
[00:05:34]  I'm very glad to be here.
[00:05:36]  Yeah, it's great to be here.
[00:05:38]  And there's a lot more bass than I would have expected.
[00:05:41]  And it smells more like weed than I would have guessed, although I don't know why that should surprise me, but it's really, it's really nice.
[00:05:46]  I'm actually going to finish closing.
[00:05:48]  We can keep rolling.
[00:05:48]  I'm going to finish closing the studio door here.
[00:05:50]  But yes, our neighbors Or let's just say burning one down in more than one way right now.
[00:05:58]  Well, I didn't call you guys down here to Mexico in order to just have my bachelor party.

=== Oswald's Meetings and the Cover-Up (15:20) ===

[00:06:03]  We are actually going to be talking, continuing our discussion about Lee Harvey Oswald's globe trotting life.
[00:06:13]  Because the sort of the Mexico connection is a pretty big piece of the puzzle in the time leading up to the assassination of JFK.
[00:06:23]  And the stories around Oswald in Mexico are strange.
[00:06:31]  There are stories of many Oswalds, multiple Oswalds, the story of no Oswalds.
[00:06:36]  There's a story of Oswald completely playing it straight, being one of the most, I guess you could say, obvious people trying to defect again in human history.
[00:06:48]  But to put it in context a little bit, Mexico during the Cold War occupied a pretty unique position in the Western hemisphere.
[00:06:59]  It was one of the few places where, in fact, well, yeah, I'm just going to say one of the few places where there was both the, East meets West, let's say.
[00:07:10]  You had the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban embassies, everyone was there.
[00:07:13]  You also had the Western countries' embassies there.
[00:07:17]  And it was kind of a, let's say, a hotbed of intrigue, especially during the 1960s.
[00:07:23]  And so that is where Lee Harvey Oswaldo, actually there's a different Lee Harvey Oswaldo, but Lee Harvey Oswald found himself just right before JFK's head did that.
[00:07:37]  Yeah, the context I would put this in, you know, why did Oswald's visit end up mattering post-assassination, is that according to, well, yeah, I mean, there were news stories in the press, some of which seem to have been planted by the CIA that Oswald had this Cuban and Soviet connection and that therefore there was some kind of Soviet-Cuban angle in the assassination.
[00:08:01]  That is to say, that Khrushchev and Castro had him killed.
[00:08:05]  And we talked about the Katzenbach memo, I think, on some of the earlier episodes that we did, where the deputy attorney general Katzenbach, who was basically running the Justice Department at that point, considering that the Attorney General's brother had just been shot.
[00:08:20]  So he was kind of out of commission at that point.
[00:08:23]  And he becomes aware that Oswald has apparently gone to Mexico City and went to both the Cuban and Soviet embassies and apparently met with a KGB officer in the Soviet embassy.
[00:08:42]  And so this is what became the basis for the cover-up.
[00:08:47]  And Katzenbach in that memo, as we talked about whenever we did that episode, outlines that Oswald has got, because of this potential for this, the Cuba and Soviet angle to get out of hand, we have to align around this Oswald did it alone story.
[00:09:06]  Otherwise, it's going to have these geopolitical implications.
[00:09:10]  And in particular, Johnson even mentions Mexico City when he talks to Warren.
[00:09:16]  I believe it was Warren.
[00:09:17]  It might have been Russell.
[00:09:18]  It was one of the people he was convincing to be on the Warren Commission named for Chief Justice Earl Warren.
[00:09:26]  And Warren didn't want to do it.
[00:09:28]  And Johnson convinces him by saying, you know, if we let this Cuban Soviet angle get out of hand, and if Oswald is associated with them, then this could become a nuclear war that kills 40 million Americans.
[00:09:45]  So that is why the fact that Oswald was in Mexico City and had these meetings or is alleged to have had these meetings, certainly the CIA documentation says that he had these meetings and said he made these phone calls.
[00:09:57]  That's why it becomes really important.
[00:09:59]  But then you wonder if it was all in the CIA, if it was all, you know, literally the day after the assassination, they didn't have to collect any more information about this.
[00:10:09]  It was all already in there.
[00:10:11]  So why were none of the relevant parties told about any of this before the assassination?
[00:10:19]  For instance, when Oswald, you know, on October 8th, I believe, he gets removed from, which again is like six weeks or so before the assassination, he gets taken off of the FBI espionage list, which means that when the Secret Service goes to look up, you know, who do we need to get off of the parade route, Oswald's name is not on that list.
[00:10:40]  Yeah, he wouldn't have been flagged.
[00:10:41]  Yeah, and he had been flagged when he went to, you know, when he defected in 1959, they put him on that list.
[00:10:48]  And they take him off that list, you know, six weeks before the assassination, right when he is in Mexico City meeting with, you know, according to the CIA, meeting with this KGB officer who the CIA,
[00:11:04]  I mean, I think Penn Bagley, who was Soviet Russia Division counterintelligence, wrote a memo the day after the assassination saying that this guy, Valery Kostakov, that Oswald met with was the head of political assassinations in the Western Hemisphere.
[00:11:19]  So that was obviously pretty explosive that Oswald had met with this guy.
[00:11:23]  Again, according to the CIA story, Oswald had met with this guy.
[00:11:27]  But why was none of that information going where it should have gone?
[00:11:32]  All of these, you know, like we were talking about earlier, you know, Jane Roman on an earlier episode, Jane Roman signing off on this memo, you know, not relaying any of this.
[00:11:43]  You know, John Newman looks at it as there was a coordinated effort to lower Oswald's profile during this time period.
[00:11:50]  Yet it's at precisely this moment that his actions, just based on, again, what the CIA says he was doing, would make you most worried about him, right?
[00:12:00]  Like he's so like internally they want to lower his profile, while externally they want to raise his profile.
[00:12:05]  Exactly.
[00:12:07]  And you need to do it in such a way that nobody arrests Oswald before he can become the Patsy, that he's kept, like I said, that he's kept off of the security index so that the Secret Service doesn't flag him.
[00:12:23]  But you still need to have it in the CIA documentary record.
[00:12:28]  Again, assuming, I mean, my hypothesis, and this is something that I got from John Newman and Jeff Morley and other people who have written about this, is that whoever did this was aware that it was going to make Oswald seem as though he was meeting with the Soviet Union for the purposes of assassinating the president.
[00:12:50]  So if that is the theory that you're operating off of, the actions of the CIA make sense because on the day after the assassination, it needs to seem like Oswald is a Soviet agent so that you can then threaten everybody and say, we need to have a cover-up, because otherwise all this Soviet Cuba stuff is going to get out and that's going to create a war.
[00:13:14]  But it can't get out before the assassination because otherwise Oswald might get arrested or he wouldn't be in a position to be the Patsy.
[00:13:21]  So you have to do all of these things, again, with routing documents, not sending them to the right place so that the wrong people don't find out ahead of time.
[00:13:32]  And that's a pretty, I mean, you know, that's something that happened in 9-11 as well, where certain people in the CIA were aware of the hijackers, but you can't blow the whistle on them before 9-11 happens.
[00:13:42]  Otherwise, you don't get your false flag attack.
[00:13:44]  So it's a pretty common, you know, if you need to designate a Patsy, it's a pretty common thing is to generate this paperwork, but make sure that the wrong people don't see it until after the appointed time, at which point, you know, you can open it up and say, hey, look, here, this guy met with these Soviets.
[00:14:00]  Even though it's very possible that Oswald never actually even went to Mexico City.
[00:14:06]  You mentioned this.
[00:14:06]  I think it was you last night, Ben.
[00:14:08]  We were having some drinks and chatting about the Kennedy assassination and just having a normal night.
[00:14:14]  And it was the absurdity of that scenario of like, imagine you're the head of assassinations and you're like, man, I really would like to get rid of that President Kennedy.
[00:14:26]  Oh, we got a walk-in today.
[00:14:28]  Oh, you seem like the man for the job.
[00:14:31]  I mean, that is actually so ridiculous, even to use it the way that they did, which was just a gambit to persuade people like Earl Warren and Richard Russell.
[00:14:43]  It seems like it shouldn't have worked anyway.
[00:14:45]  Although they probably didn't ask for details about it or even stop to think about it, I think.
[00:14:50]  Because if you start just thinking about it, like the KGB observed him in the Soviet Union, and like he clearly was a known entity to them.
[00:15:00]  So the idea that they would then use him to kill the president is just like just a farce on its face.
[00:15:07]  But it held up enough for long enough that one of the first mentions of, we talked about Carlos Brunier, who was this Cuban anti-Castro Cuban exile.
[00:15:19]  And the day after the assassination, or maybe even the day of, like in the evening edition, he was talking, he told the Washington Post, like, oh, Oswald is a pro-Cuba, pro-Castro guy.
[00:15:31]  And that was one of the first instances of that, of this idea that like Castro and Khrushchev did this.
[00:15:35]  And obviously, he, you know, that's based on his experience with Oswald in New Orleans.
[00:15:41]  But of course, Brunier was himself a CIA asset.
[00:15:44]  And, you know, like he was perfectly positioned to have this apparent, oh, wow, apparently Oswald is like a pro-Cuba guy.
[00:15:53]  Oh, I beat that guy's ass.
[00:15:55]  Yeah, I beat him up one time in this like, you know, huge scene on Canal Street.
[00:16:01]  It's just very convenient.
[00:16:03]  And then there's Brunier to raise this idea in the press, which was, I mean, that article and there were some other, you know, you mentioned Frank Sturgis put out some stuff.
[00:16:13]  Like that was the stuff that triggered Katzenbach to write this memo because he talks in that memo about, oh, there are these stories coming out in the press now about this Cuba angle.
[00:16:21]  And if we don't get a lock on this, like we're going to have some serious problems.
[00:16:25]  Yes, that I think we said off-air, so I should just explain it.
[00:16:29]  Peter Dale Scott wrote about this in Ramparts in like 1973.
[00:16:33]  He was one of the first people to make the connection between Watergate and Dallas.
[00:16:37]  And what led him to that realization was that he was already looking into this Frank Fiorini, Frank Sturgis fellow as being involved in gun running and other mob-connected operations when he suddenly gets arrested, breaking into the Watergate.
[00:16:53]  And then Peter is quite surprised by this.
[00:16:55]  And he goes back and, you know, he'd been looking into what Sturgis was doing.
[00:16:59]  And in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, he is coordinating, apparently, with other people in Florida to leak information connecting Oswald to Castro right away.
[00:17:14]  And it gets, it's sort of ham-fisted to the point that it almost looks like it was maybe meant to be discredited.
[00:17:21]  Like maybe it was meant to do what it sort of did do, which was necessitate a cover-up.
[00:17:27]  So between the reports coming out of Mexico City and then these other reports coming from people connected to Sturgis and other Miami Cubans, you've got this real danger that would go along with investigating this that they can use to tell people.
[00:17:47]  So that's what Warren gets told by LBJ.
[00:17:49]  And LBJ was describing this later.
[00:17:51]  I think it was to Hoover.
[00:17:53]  He's recalling what happened.
[00:17:55]  And he just says, or he could have been just recounting this to not to Hoover.
[00:18:01]  So he says, I pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.
[00:18:06]  And I say now, I don't want Mr. Khrushchev to be told tomorrow and testify before a camera that he killed his fellow in the castle, killed him and all.
[00:18:12]  What you do is look at the facts, bring in any other facts, and we want in here and determine who killed the president.
[00:18:19]  And then he said, LBJ basically makes fun of Warren for crying.
[00:18:22]  And, you know, it's like, I won't turn you down.
[00:18:25]  I won't turn you down.
[00:18:27]  He says the world's going to end if you don't do this.
[00:18:29]  And then he makes fun of the guy for crying off at the end of the world.
[00:18:31]  That was the president.
[00:18:33]  He's just showing him his penis and being like, why are you crying, girl?
[00:18:37]  It's kind of just like, that was sort of his whole thing.
[00:18:39]  He did that sometimes.
[00:18:40]  He's rocking a hog.
[00:18:42]  Yeah.
[00:18:42]  I mean, the Mexico sojourn would be like kind of an inversion, I guess, of like the approach to Kennedy that I think many people take, which is that like, and this is still like a kind of a very much a Bircher, I don't know if Bircher's exactly, because they might have thought Kennedy himself was a communist.
[00:19:04]  In fact, I, without checking.
[00:19:06]  100%.
[00:19:07]  I think it's well within their capabilities to both believe that Kennedy was a communist and he was also killed by communists.
[00:19:12]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:13]  Yes.
[00:19:15]  I think that actually is what they do, I think.
[00:19:17]  Oh, that makes sense.
[00:19:18]  Well, it has happened before.
[00:19:20]  But that like, you know, there's the theory, and there are still some, like the more soldier of fortune crowd might believe this too, that like Oswald was a Soviet agent that was assisted by DGI, I think it's the Cuban intelligence, and the KGB in an assassination, successful assassination of President Kennedy.
[00:19:42]  And that the CIA, which is itself a sort of a pinko institution.
[00:19:48]  That's what they believe.
[00:19:49]  They believe that.
[00:19:50]  It blows my mind.
[00:19:51]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they betrayed our friends in Rhodesia or whatever.
[00:19:56]  But that basically that, and this would be your smoking gun, right?
[00:20:02]  Like he goes down to Mexico.
[00:20:04]  He meets with the Cubans.
[00:20:05]  He meets with a supposed KGB assassination, Department 13 assassination officer, and he presumably receives his mission details.
[00:20:17]  And the CIA's evidence is a photograph of someone who was not Liari Oswald and some phone messages and a kidnapped secretary, kidnapped by the Mexican police.
[00:20:29]  That's right.
[00:20:30]  Tortured even a little bit, too, right?
[00:20:32]  I think so.
[00:20:33]  Yeah, they arrested her and then they released her.
[00:20:37]  And then they were like, oh, we need to get her back and let's do it.
[00:20:39]  I think they called it a vigorous and exhaustive interrogation.
[00:20:42]  So you can imagine what that means when you tell somebody in the CIA to do a vigorous and exhaustive interrogation.
[00:20:49]  Yeah, I mean, Aaron, I'd be interested to know your point of view about what happened because it seems to me like Oswald did go to Mexico City.
[00:20:57]  It seems to me.
[00:20:58]  Based on Sylvia Duran and Valeri Kostakov meeting with him and apparently, again, they could be lying and they could be trying to conceal something themselves.
[00:21:10]  But they seem to think that the Oswald they met with is the Oswald that they saw on TV.
[00:21:14]  I think Duran gave a different description to someone.
[00:21:17]  Well, Duran's story, and she was the secretary to the consular general.

=== Oswald's Soviet Connection (15:01) ===

[00:21:24]  She was Mexican, but she worked in the Cuban consulate and she handled this kind of visa because Oswald basically, his ostensible reason for going was to re-defect.
[00:21:32]  That was what he said to them, I mean, assuming it was him.
[00:21:36]  And that he wanted to go.
[00:21:37]  But it doesn't make any sense because when he did defect, he went to Finland and he went to Helsinki.
[00:21:45]  And this was like a known shortcut to get a visa to go into the Soviet Union.
[00:21:48]  It was not that well known.
[00:21:49]  And in fact, Eddie Helms said it was not something that the average person would have known, but Oswald did know it in 1959.
[00:21:55]  So why didn't he just do that again?
[00:21:56]  Like instead, he's going to go to Mexico City and try to get a transit visa for Cuba and then from Cuba go to the Soviet Union.
[00:22:05]  But the policy of the Soviet Union, which he must have known, or it seems like people who assigned him to do this must have known, is that you can only get a visa to go to the Soviet Union if you go to your own country's embassy.
[00:22:22]  So that would have been the embassy in Washington.
[00:22:25]  So it seems to me like he was instructed to do this so that you would get Cuba and the Soviet Union together in one story.
[00:22:35]  Because otherwise the choice of doing that given he's already successfully defected a totally different way.
[00:22:41]  The ostensible reason that he needed to even contact the Soviets in the first place is that the Cuban embassy was like, we need some photographs of you.
[00:22:48]  So he calls up the Soviets.
[00:22:50]  And I believe that phone call is the one that's tapped.
[00:22:55]  There's a bizarre phone call where the sequence of events is he goes to the so this happens on the September 27th 1963.
[00:23:06]  So again, very shortly before the assassination.
[00:23:10]  He goes to the Cuban embassy and he basically says, I need a transit visa to go to the Soviet Union.
[00:23:18]  And Sylvia Durand tells him, I can only give you this transit visa if you go to the Soviet embassy and get a Soviet visa.
[00:23:25]  So he tries to do that.
[00:23:26]  He goes to the Soviet embassy and he meets with Kostakov, who apparently was in the KGB, but they have to have a day job so they can appear to be.
[00:23:37]  Cultural attaché, usually.
[00:23:38]  Yeah, I think they gave him a bullshit visa paperwork job that probably was pretty easy to blow off so that he could do his KGB stuff because he does need to at least appear to be like a consular official.
[00:23:53]  So yeah, Oswald meets with him in that capacity of trying to get a visa.
[00:23:57]  And Kostakov basically tells him, no, like, first off, it's going to take at least four months.
[00:24:02]  And anyway, you have to go to Washington to do this because you're an American.
[00:24:05]  You're not Mexican.
[00:24:06]  So I can't help you.
[00:24:09]  And so Oswald basically refuses.
[00:24:12]  He doesn't even want to sign the paperwork.
[00:24:13]  He's like, whatever, I'm done with this.
[00:24:16]  But then there's this one.
[00:24:17]  So determined.
[00:24:18]  I know.
[00:24:19]  I know.
[00:24:19]  He was so determined.
[00:24:20]  And then he is as soon as he's just done with that.
[00:24:22]  It's just like this Russian in a suit is sitting down talking.
[00:24:25]  I'm like, bro, you need to do this.
[00:24:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:28]  Yeah.
[00:24:29]  And he's just over it.
[00:24:30]  He's not interested anymore.
[00:24:32]  Yeah.
[00:24:32]  But then there's this weird phone call where he apparently, I mean, if you listen to the phone call, it's Oswald goes back to the Cuban consulate.
[00:24:43]  Well, actually, so first Oswald does go back to the Cuban consulate and just lies to Duran and says to Duran, I got a Soviet visa.
[00:24:52]  They're going to give me one.
[00:24:53]  So can you give me this transit visa?
[00:24:55]  And she's like, I don't think that's true.
[00:24:56]  And she calls Kostakov and he's like, yeah, that didn't happen.
[00:25:00]  But importantly, so there's a phone call between the two of them and it's tapped.
[00:25:05]  But I think the two of them were smart enough to not say Oswald's name on that call.
[00:25:12]  So now, like, if you are the, if you're the CIA and again, you're trying to continue to, because I don't think a lot of, I don't think the people who organize this, I think this was a continuation of his Fair Play for Cuba committee discreditation, basically, that now this guy who started this Fair Play for Cuba committee in New Orleans, he gets the like debate thing that he did was on August 21st.
[00:25:36]  So like a month later, he then is like, okay, well, I've been found out.
[00:25:39]  So now I'm going to flee.
[00:25:40]  I'm going to go back to the rat's nest, right?
[00:25:42]  I'm going to flee back to Cuba and Russia.
[00:25:46]  But he, so from their point of view, the problem now is that there's not really a clear link between Oswald and Kostakov because they don't have Kostako.
[00:26:02]  We know about the meeting between Kostakov and Oswald because Kostakov has talked about it.
[00:26:07]  So they don't have any intel on this call.
[00:26:10]  So they have to have this phone.
[00:26:11]  And the phone call between Duran and Kostakov doesn't mention Oswald's name.
[00:26:15]  So now there's this very strange call where Oswald apparently goes back to the Cuban consulate again and is sitting next to Sylvia Duran and calls the Soviet embassy.
[00:26:31]  But when you and the Lopez report, which was a part of the HSCA investigation, calls the transcript of this phone call incomprehensible because it doesn't seem like first off, it doesn't seem like it's Oswald's voice.
[00:26:46]  And because this person is speaking Spanish and Oswald apparently did not speak Spanish.
[00:26:52]  Wow, we saw from my intro.
[00:26:54]  It doesn't look like that.
[00:26:56]  But it seems clear from the way he's talking that he doesn't know what happened.
[00:26:59]  Yeah.
[00:27:01]  Whoever it was that made this phone call doesn't know the conversation.
[00:27:04]  That happened in the prior meeting.
[00:27:05]  Yeah, like because Oswald has this whole conversation with Kostakov.
[00:27:09]  He doesn't end up signing the visa paperwork.
[00:27:12]  But it seems like whoever recorded this call doesn't know that.
[00:27:14]  And they're just trying to fish enough and get the conversation going on enough so that now there's this documented Oswald, I met with Kostakov.
[00:27:24]  Here's how I spell my name, et cetera, to get that into the record.
[00:27:30]  And there are other strange phone calls that are like that, where someone who speaks broken Russian makes a phone call to the Soviet embassy.
[00:27:41]  But I mean, I even heard an anecdote from Peter Del Scott recently that Oswald used to read Turgaev.
[00:27:49]  Like he would read Russian literature for fun, right?
[00:27:51]  So this is like clearly a guy who can speak Russian.
[00:27:54]  So it's obviously not him on the phone.
[00:27:56]  Oh, Turgaev in the original.
[00:27:58]  No, exactly, exactly.
[00:28:01]  And because when he was in Minsk, he would go to the library and get Russian language books, Turgaev amongst them.
[00:28:08]  And so even the person taking the transcript and doing the translation in the CIA of this phone call is like, oh, this is almost incomprehensible Russian.
[00:28:18]  So it's things like that where it seems like they didn't get enough out of the stuff that Oswald did in the embassy.
[00:28:27]  And they needed to have these phone calls that would kind of explicate and put on the record in the CIA documents.
[00:28:35]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:36]  And kind of give more substance to it.
[00:28:38]  Because I don't think Oswald was himself a very effective intelligence agent.
[00:28:43]  He was kind of bumbling in that respect.
[00:28:45]  Yeah.
[00:28:47]  The whole Mexico City thing is bizarre.
[00:28:49]  And I think that you can't really say whether he was or was not in Mexico City because of a number of conflicting testimonies from different people and evidence that points in different directions.
[00:29:05]  There was a woman, Sylvia Odeo, who was in around Dallas, I believe, is where she lived.
[00:29:10]  And while Oswald was supposed to be in Mexico City, she saw Oswald come to her house with some right-wing Cubans, and they were making a point about how he was going to kill the president.
[00:29:22]  And she was a very reliable person.
[00:29:24]  She told this to other people beforehand, like I think her priest maybe even.
[00:29:30]  And she was like really shaken up about it.
[00:29:34]  She fainted when she saw him on television.
[00:29:36]  She was like, that's the guy.
[00:29:37]  And he went by, I think, Lee.
[00:29:38]  They called him Leon or something like that.
[00:29:40]  Or they get like Leon Oswald.
[00:29:42]  Leon Oswald.
[00:29:43]  Well, Harvey, yeah.
[00:29:44]  Harvey only shows up when the name Harvey.
[00:29:47]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:47]  Well, yeah, the CIA apparently mistakenly put the wrong middle name for him in their main file.
[00:29:55]  Yeah, which is a totally inexplicable story.
[00:29:59]  Ben Howard has Oswald.
[00:30:01]  Yeah.
[00:30:01]  I mean, it's like the person who did that, I think, did so knowingly to try to, I think it was a part of the mole hunt to try to ferret out if somebody would correct the record.
[00:30:12]  Basically, yeah, like if you, or if you, so, so if his, if, if they put in his file that his middle name is is Henry and you're the KGB mole that's in the CIA and that's the only thing you know about him.
[00:30:26]  So you pass the Henry name back to the Soviet Union, who any, if you, you presumably would need to have your own mole back, you need to have your own CIA mole in the KGB to say, hey, I spotted somebody using the Lee Henry Oswald name.
[00:30:42]  So that gives you a sense that that person is probably the handler for whoever does the mole name.
[00:30:46]  Yeah, it's a way to, it's like you leak certain details or Peter Elscott called it the barium meal, the specific thing where you, before you do like certain types of medical imaging, you'll have, you'll eat a meal that has barium in it.
[00:30:58]  So like your systems show up.
[00:31:00]  You know, you could also call it like a marked card is sometimes what it's called, where you insert this.
[00:31:05]  It's actually like a common technique in if you want to prevent something from being leaked, you'll like give every person a different copy of a document and change one word or something in it.
[00:31:16]  It's a very common trope at the end of murder mysteries too, right?
[00:31:19]  It's like, you know, I never mentioned that the window was unlocked.
[00:31:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:24]  It's things of this nature.
[00:31:25]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:31:25]  It's increasing information.
[00:31:27]  Yeah.
[00:31:28]  And I think that's, you know, because the person who did that, Ann Edgiter, you know, when she, I mean, we know that when she wrote the wrong middle name on Oswald's, this was his main 201 personnel file at the CIA.
[00:31:40]  Like she was looking at a document that had his correct last name.
[00:31:44]  And on multiple different occasions, she was looking at that same document and then still used his wrong middle name.
[00:31:49]  So it seems very intentional that she did this.
[00:31:53]  And again, it's just another one of the indications that there was some kind of counterintelligence operation going on that was using Oswald to figure out what the Soviet Union knew.
[00:32:02]  Because like I said, that would be a good way is, you know, anybody using that name now, you know, that they're interested in Oswald.
[00:32:10]  And that would be a good indication that they, you know, heard about it from their, whoever their KGB handler was, you know, whoever the mole is in the CIA.
[00:32:25]  I mean, there is so much strangeness around that.
[00:32:30]  Mexico City back angle, just to bring it back to that.
[00:32:33]  I want to point out a transcript of a conversation, not the entire thing, but there was a recording supposedly made of Oswald talking on the phone, and they listened to that.
[00:32:46]  And then a day after the assassination, there's a conversation between LBJ and Hoover.
[00:32:51]  The recording of this conversation is gone, but they have a transcript.
[00:32:55]  LBJ asks Hoover, have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?
[00:33:01]  Hoover says, no, that one angle is very confusing.
[00:33:05]  For this reason, we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy using Oswald's name.
[00:33:10]  That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice nor his appearance.
[00:33:14]  In other words, it appears that there's a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.
[00:33:19]  Now, later, Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway, who were working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, they wrote this thing called the Lopez Report, where they say, inasmuch as the Dallas agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban embassy to the Russian embassy in Mexico and examined the photographs of the visitor to the embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape nor the photograph pertained to Oswald.
[00:33:45]  And there's even a statement from Hoover where he references what he thinks is CIA chicanery.
[00:33:52]  He says, it's actually marginalia at the bottom of a memo pertaining to all this, but he writes, okay, but I hope you're not being taken in.
[00:34:01]  I can't forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA nor the false story regarding Oswald's trip to Mexico City, only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.
[00:34:12]  And this was written by Jay Edgar Hoover.
[00:34:14]  J. Edgar Hoover.
[00:34:16]  Yeah, I think he was talking specifically there, too, about the tapes, because one of the issues that emerges is that, like you said, there's clearly these documents where people have done analysis of the tapes, and they could tell that the people in the tapes are not Oswald.
[00:34:32]  And obviously, if that's true and somebody was impersonating Oswald before the assassination, I mean, that's kind of like intelligence.
[00:34:42]  Somebody did that on purpose for whatever reason.
[00:34:44]  Clearly, there was intelligence.
[00:34:45]  If those tapes are an imposter, obviously that's an intelligence operation.
[00:34:50]  And so, yeah, like clearly people had heard the tapes and said that it was, you know, such that Hoover was reporting it to the president.
[00:34:57]  But then those tapes were destroyed.
[00:34:59]  And the CIA claimed for a long time that the tapes were destroyed before the assassination.
[00:35:05]  And that was a problem because there was all this FBI document, all these FBI documents, where people in the FBI were talking about listening to the tapes.
[00:35:14]  And even Ann Edgiter, who, like I said, worked for Angleton at the counterintelligence unit of the CIA, she said that the tapes were hand-delivered across the border in Texas.
[00:35:29]  So the cover story that the tapes were destroyed before the assassination kind of falls apart.
[00:35:35]  And I think Hoover in that instance was pissed off because he looked like an idiot.
[00:35:38]  He looked like he didn't know what the fuck was going on because his people are talking about tapes and they've listened to tapes and they've compared tapes.
[00:35:43]  And the CIA is saying we destroyed all the tapes before the assassination.
[00:35:46]  So it's just a very sloppy, very sloppy cover story.
[00:35:49]  So in like in like basically a like a month, month and a half, two month period, the CIA would have just, I mean, you know, listen, I know in large bureaucracies like the CIA, things get destroyed sometimes.
[00:36:06]  Two months seems like a particularly rapid road to destruction for that.
[00:36:12]  I mean, I can't claim to know how the CIA generally did things of this nature, but I think they would try to at least keep an audio record of that for maybe a year, you know, see where it goes.

=== A Face in the Crowd (02:19) ===

[00:36:26]  At least until the guy goes to Cuba.
[00:36:28]  So if people, if the idea is that maybe it wasn't Oswald, who are the prime suspects for who it could be?
[00:36:37]  I don't know who that guy is.
[00:36:38]  There's a guy.
[00:36:38]  There's a picture of a dude and nobody knows who he is.
[00:36:41]  He looks chill.
[00:36:42]  He looks like somebody who somebody should recognize because he looks like an American.
[00:36:45]  Someone recognized him.
[00:36:46]  I'm looking him up right now.
[00:36:48]  He's like wearing sunglasses.
[00:36:49]  I haven't looked at this picture in a while.
[00:36:50]  Right.
[00:36:50]  He looks like a linebacker and like he, yeah, like presumably.
[00:36:53]  Yes.
[00:36:54]  No, he's not wearing sunglasses.
[00:36:55]  He looks like he's 50 years old.
[00:36:57]  He literally looks nothing.
[00:36:58]  He doesn't look like Oswald.
[00:36:59]  Yeah, he looks nothing like.
[00:37:00]  Like Lee Harvey Oswald is a slight gentleman, right?
[00:37:05]  You know, he's not a very, he's not a very big.
[00:37:06]  He's Spike Jones coated.
[00:37:08]  I can't tell.
[00:37:09]  And certainly now my ability to discern height from photographs is completely thrown off by the presence of Ben.
[00:37:16]  But this guy is just, it's like a fully different build than Lee Harvey Oswald, but also just a clearly different face.
[00:37:25]  He looks like Ed O'Neill from Maryland's Children.
[00:37:28]  Yeah, that's what I always think of whenever I see the picture.
[00:37:31]  Yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald kind of looks like, I'm looking at this one picture of him getting arrested.
[00:37:36]  He kind of looks like American apparel style.
[00:37:40]  He just the way the lights on his face.
[00:37:41]  He looks like a little skater director.
[00:37:43]  He does look a little skater guy.
[00:37:44]  Yeah, he does.
[00:37:46]  He looks like he's like trying to do a bump with his face.
[00:37:48]  He would be like so into Sophia Coppola if he made it through.
[00:37:52]  He'd be wearing an XXL Greta Gerwig Talty he got from ISE.
[00:37:59]  So Mexico.
[00:38:01]  This was sort of, Peter Dale Scott talks about how this was part of like a possible two-track cover-up.
[00:38:10]  Yeah, I was about to say two-track track, but cover-up for, and we've sort of already talked about this in the episode, right?
[00:38:15]  Is that like CIA was using him and they kind of wanted to leave both options open, right?
[00:38:23]  The option where it was like very clearly linking him to the Eastern block and I guess now the south of the border block, and which is really what they should have called the pink tide.
[00:38:36]  Or one that's like he's a Patsy.
[00:38:39]  So like it's like, it's really almost like insurance, right?
[00:38:42]  To see which track that they want to go with.
[00:38:44]  Like the lone nut or the Psychs.

=== CIA's Dual Track Cover-Up (11:38) ===

[00:38:46]  I guess they were going for the Patsy.
[00:38:47]  Yeah, lone nut.
[00:38:48]  Yeah, lone nut.
[00:38:49]  Yeah, not Patsy.
[00:38:51]  Lone nut.
[00:38:52]  We think he's a Patsy.
[00:38:53]  He said he was a Patsy.
[00:38:54]  He said he was a Patsy.
[00:38:55]  That was his theory.
[00:38:56]  He was the first conspiracy theorist of the JK assassination.
[00:38:59]  When he says I'm a Patsy, he is positing a conspiracy theory, which is probably the second conspiracy theorist was Robert Kennedy.
[00:39:08]  Yeah.
[00:39:08]  Yeah.
[00:39:08]  Because he immediately was, like, calling people saying, you guys did this to the CIA and so on.
[00:39:20]  So you mentioned either in the first part of this episode that we did or earlier just now, I can't remember when you said, but that all of these sort of, like, mishandled memos going to all these different departments.
[00:39:33]  all of these kind of like redirected paper trails, none of this matches up with anything that was told to the Warren Commission, right?
[00:39:40]  Yeah.
[00:39:41]  I mean, the Warren Commission was told that the CIA has very minimal files on this guy, that certainly they were not surveilling him heavily and had tons of cable traffic about him, and certainly not that he was ever, you know, they had any operational interest in him or were using him for any purposes.
[00:39:58]  But even, you know, if you look at testimony from people, like Ann Edgiter was, again, in Angleton's counterintelligence office, and she was handling Oswald's file for the last basically three years of his life, starting when she opened the file in late 1960.
[00:40:14]  And, you know, she said that when, because they were all, you know, they hear about the assassination in Langley HQ, and they turn on their radios.
[00:40:23]  And when they heard the name Oswald, she said it was electric.
[00:40:26]  Like everybody was all of a sudden like, oh, okay, this is interesting.
[00:40:31]  Which I think just directly.
[00:40:33]  Which would be weird if no one had ever heard of it.
[00:40:34]  Right, exactly.
[00:40:35]  You know, because the ostensible story would be, we had never heard of him.
[00:40:40]  And then we went back and looked.
[00:40:41]  And, oh, like, yeah, he does show up in some of these places.
[00:40:44]  But actually contemporaneous, like when the assassination happened, obviously we could see from the documents they had been surveilling him heavily.
[00:40:50]  And And so they, I think, recognized that there's a real problem here because this has the potential, especially because it intersects with the Castro assassination plots, even for people who had no foreknowledge of any kind about the assassination or that Oswald might be involved.
[00:41:12]  Even if you were just, let's say, we talked about the fact that the Fair Play for Cuba committee operation that Oswald seems to have been a part of or was definitely, there was a lot of attention paid to him as a part of that operation, whatever his role in that was.
[00:41:27]  If you start to unravel that, if the Warrington Commission starts to get into that, and this is what ultimately happened when the church committee did get into it, you're going to find out about all these crazy, illegal Castro assassination plots.
[00:41:39]  So there's so much incentive for everybody in the CIA to just lie, destroy documents, which we know happened.
[00:41:46]  One of the most egregious examples of this cover-up was the House Select Committee was investigating the JFK assassination.
[00:41:56]  And so we talked about the fact that Oswald seemed to have this weird relationship with Carlos Bernier, who was running the DRE, this anti-Cuban, anti-Castro Cuban exile group in New Orleans.
[00:42:10]  And the person who was handling that group was this guy, George Joanides.
[00:42:16]  And the CIA made him the liaison between the House Select Committee and the CIA.
[00:42:23]  So if we're going to get documents, you're going to go to George Joanides.
[00:42:26]  Well, they told the Select Committee that he was just a lawyer at the CIA.
[00:42:32]  He had nothing to do with anything.
[00:42:33]  He certainly was not personally involved in any of this.
[00:42:37]  And it turns out they just straight up lied to the House Select Committee, this congressional committee, and put exactly the worst possible person from the Select Committee's point of view, which is somebody who was directly involved in all the Castro-Cuba stuff, all the anti-Castro exile groups.
[00:42:56]  The one relating to Oswald specifically that Oswald had these interactions with, that's exactly the person they put in place.
[00:43:02]  And it seems very logical that you would put him in place because he knows where all the bodies are buried.
[00:43:06]  He did all of that stuff.
[00:43:08]  And so he knows exactly what needs to be censored and what documents they can't get.
[00:43:13]  And that's exactly what happened.
[00:43:15]  So I mean, that's how Blakey, you know, he described their investigation into that stuff as totally frustrated by this CIA intransigence.
[00:43:24]  And it's, he complained about that later.
[00:43:28]  At the time, that's when he found out.
[00:43:31]  That was years later.
[00:43:32]  That was around the 1990s when he said, like, I now agree that the CIA is an institution that you should never, ever trust unless you can totally verify something to that effect.
[00:43:42]  But at the time of the investigation, the people on the staff, like Lopez and Hardaway and Gate and Fonzi, were all complaining to Blakey about this guy.
[00:43:50]  This guy's like stonewalling us.
[00:43:51]  And he's like intentionally screwing us up.
[00:43:54]  So they knew right away.
[00:43:55]  And then Blakey, but then Blakey finally, in the 90s, he says on frontline, I think it's on the frontline documentary or in response to it that PBS did around the time of the 30th anniversary.
[00:44:06]  He says, like, yeah, the CIA is an institution you just cannot trust.
[00:44:09]  I was told that before, and now I totally believe it.
[00:44:11]  And then later in 2017, I believe, he was a signatory to the American Truth and Reconciliation petition, which says that the state was involved in the murder of President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and that there should be a truth and reconciliation process.
[00:44:30]  So it's the guy who did the most recent investigation and chaired that committee has come out saying he believes that the state killed Kennedy.
[00:44:37]  It's really a remarkable admission, and it went mostly unreported by the press.
[00:44:40]  It's like, what are they actually like, why is there at the time of the Warrant Commission, like you can understand the ostensible reasons we want, we've been trying to kill Castro and that's illegal.
[00:44:50]  And so we need to protect that.
[00:44:52]  But then that comes out in the church committee.
[00:44:54]  Yeah.
[00:44:55]  And so at the House Select Committee, like, what are they still covering up?
[00:44:58]  Exactly.
[00:44:58]  Because we, we, like, it's, that's done and dusted.
[00:45:00]  We know all this.
[00:45:01]  Exactly.
[00:45:02]  You know?
[00:45:02]  So what is, and especially at this point, 60 years later, like, what is what operations that are ongoing today could possibly be compromised by releasing 60-year-old documents?
[00:45:15]  Well, that was, that was one of the interesting things that I noticed when, because there's been in the past, like, I guess, five or six years, a big push to like release more documents, right?
[00:45:26]  A bunch of them came out, I think, during Trump, and then there was supposed to be like the final, I think it was the final, don't quote me on this, but I'm sure both of you could just tell me if I'm wrong.
[00:45:38]  They were supposed to release like the rest of the documents.
[00:45:40]  Like it was all going to be.
[00:45:41]  According to the law there, they have to.
[00:45:44]  And then last year, they released some more, and then Biden's, like, the administration, I don't know if Biden, Biden probably still thinks JFK is alive, but like not in a conspiracy way, like genuinely, like in a sort of return to childhood kind of way.
[00:45:58]  But they were supposed to release the rest of them, and then they're like, oh, COVID really slowed it down.
[00:46:05]  And then like the rest still haven't come out yet.
[00:46:07]  Well, they've said that the CIA gets to decide what they're going to release.
[00:46:11]  Like there's no outside party.
[00:46:12]  And this, I mean, even like.
[00:46:14]  There's no oversight.
[00:46:15]  Yeah.
[00:46:15]  There was at one point the Assassination Records Review Board, which is when a lot of stuff came out in like a lot of these CIA Oswald files came out in the 90s.
[00:46:24]  But they were also stymied as well.
[00:46:28]  So there are still, I think, at least 4,000 documents that the ARRB identified as being related and should be released.
[00:46:39]  And those documents have just not been released, despite the fact that the law says that they are obligated to release them.
[00:46:47]  And it's clear that there are still things that they are hiding.
[00:46:52]  And it's, you know, again, it makes sense that they wanted to cover up the Castro assassinations, you know, in the 60s.
[00:47:01]  And even in the 70s, it makes sense that there might have been stuff.
[00:47:04]  But in 2023, Kesho's dead.
[00:47:08]  What is still, like, what is still, is there any, is it really, can you really, is it really credible that there's still any kind of active operation going on from 60 years ago?
[00:47:19]  Absolutely incredible.
[00:47:20]  Everyone involved, not everyone involved, but I could have very, it would be difficult to imagine that there would be a very active, slowly, slowly, they started slowly poisoning a baby.
[00:47:36]  And they got to wait for that to play out.
[00:47:38]  I think the tide is turning a little bit, though, in terms of the cover-up.
[00:47:42]  You're right that there's no reason to have it go this long, ostensibly, like by their own logic that they state about, you know, methods and sources and all this stuff.
[00:47:53]  But what is really remarkable to me, after looking into what the CIA does about its most scandalous activities, when there's something that you do know and you can see a procedure, you can see something that they did, it gives you a view into what the logic is of the institution.
[00:48:12]  And the Frank Olson case, to me, is really remarkable because why was Frank Olson killed?
[00:48:18]  Apparently, there's more and more evidence to suggest that he was killed because he was, they were worried he was a security risk and he was going to release potentially or reveal secrets about the biological weapons program in Korea where airmen who'd been captured started talking about how they were using biological weapons.
[00:48:39]  And the U.S. has denied this always.
[00:48:41]  And that was justification.
[00:48:44]  It was the pretext for launching the MKUltra program, right?
[00:48:47]  That, oh, they've got this brainwashing technology because they're tricking our soldiers into saying we're using chemical weapons.
[00:48:53]  And of course, we would never do that.
[00:48:54]  And so it must be that they have very advanced oriental despotism techniques over there that we're going to have to study and make our own mind control programs.
[00:49:03]  Ancient Chinese secrets of mind control.
[00:49:05]  There's a mind control gap and we've got to deal with it, right?
[00:49:08]  So that's the excuse.
[00:49:10]  But there wasn't because in all likelihood, they were really dropping these weapons.
[00:49:14]  Now, to deal with Olson, they apparently kill him.
[00:49:18]  They assassinate him.
[00:49:20]  And when Seymour Hirsch spoke to one of his high-placed guys in the agency, he came back and told Seymour, yeah, there's an apparatus for that.
[00:49:31]  There's a guy who's a security risk.
[00:49:33]  You can get rid of him.
[00:49:35]  And that's what happened in this case.
[00:49:36]  He was deemed a security risk, and you had to get rid of him.
[00:49:40]  But what that tells us is that among the things, what was the security risk that he posed, he was going to reveal state crimes.
[00:49:49]  So if you have that as your logic, you can kill an official.
[00:49:54]  You can kill any official, apparently.
[00:49:56]  If Kennedy is talking to Castro, some sort of entity like that, perhaps with the Office of Security interfacing with Continuity of Government or Doomsday Project overriding emergency powers, it could have actually been sanctioned in that sort of a way.
[00:50:11]  And we can establish pretty clearly that they consider the exposure of state crimes to be reason for killing someone, killing an official even.

=== JFK Investigation Secrets (05:50) ===

[00:50:24]  And certainly in the JFK investigation, there are a lot of untimely deaths.
[00:50:29]  Yes.
[00:50:29]  I mean, you mentioned George DeMoris Sheldon.
[00:50:31]  He's an example of one.
[00:50:33]  Right when Bill O'Reilly was walking.
[00:50:35]  We might have mentioned this in a previous episode, but Bill O'Reilly for a long time claimed that I love this, speaking of lie memoirs, I love this lie that he was walking up to George DeMornchild's door to knock on it when he heard the fatal gunshot of DeMornishal blowing his own brains out.
[00:50:51]  This is a stupid lie of all the lies you could tell.
[00:50:54]  I had the best time meeting in all the world.
[00:50:56]  You got it.
[00:50:57]  They talk a lot about the big lie, but sometimes if you tell a dumb lie, people are like, well, he can't be making that up.
[00:51:03]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:04]  It's a classic move, though.
[00:51:05]  Yeah, I think it's so stupid that people think that there's no way it could be.
[00:51:09]  Yeah.
[00:51:11]  I've got, I used to tell people that my great great, no, no, I always tell people that Max's great-grandfather invented the dimples on golf balls.
[00:51:20]  And change.
[00:51:20]  Yeah, you used to tell people your name was Gretchen.
[00:51:23]  Yeah, that is true, but that's to catch it's no.
[00:51:26]  Well, my legal name is Gretchen, but I go by Brace.
[00:51:30]  It's Gretchen Brace, Brace Belden.
[00:51:33]  But yeah, it's, yeah, so there's a lot of very convenient deaths during the I think it's also ominous that the Office of Security, of course, was one of the two offices that was involved in handling Oswald's file for handling most important files during his entire period between when he apparently came on the CIA's radar in October 1959 until when he shot the president.
[00:51:57]  That was who was handling a lot of those files.
[00:52:00]  Same people that handled the sexual blackmail stuff, Paul Gaynor's like security research services or whatever.
[00:52:05]  I mean, they were up to every crazy thing that you could be doing just about.
[00:52:10]  And I mean, the fact that James McCord is the guy that they sent, he's the guy handling the Fair Play for Cuba stuff.
[00:52:15]  He's the guy they send to cover up the to deal with the local authorities because there was a problem with Frank Olson when he was tossed out of the window in 1953.
[00:52:23]  He actually was still alive and he like said some shit that kind of alarmed some people out there on the pavement.
[00:52:28]  This dude just falling 10 stories.
[00:52:31]  And they're like, well, we got a little problem here.
[00:52:34]  We better send in the cleanup man.
[00:52:36]  And that's James McCord.
[00:52:37]  I throws an anvil out after him.
[00:52:40]  It's a really big piano.
[00:52:42]  Yeah.
[00:52:43]  I heard from someone who has done a lot of research here who interviewed people in the CIA, and they said that a person who was in the CIA told a researcher that James McCord's nickname was Zap Man, and that they suspect that he actually killed J. Edgar Hoover.
[00:53:03]  Which I'm not saying that I believe, subscribe to this, but Hoover did die at a very unfortuitous time for Nixon.
[00:53:11]  His death really did clear the way, I think, for Watergate potentially.
[00:53:15]  So I don't put it out of the realm of possibility, but I think it's a little nutty.
[00:53:19]  I think it's a little nutty.
[00:53:20]  But they said he may have had some sort of pin, like a writing ballpoint pin.
[00:53:24]  Did he ever die?
[00:53:25]  A heart attack.
[00:53:26]  Oh, okay.
[00:53:27]  It fits.
[00:53:29]  So I don't know if that's really true about McCord, but we do know enough about him to say he was very well placed at these events, like Frank Olson, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Watergate.
[00:53:39]  I mean, he was that, and he was in the Office of Security, which is the inner sanctum of the inner sanctum.
[00:53:44]  It's funny sometimes, like reading, especially about the CIA kind of in the golden age of spycraft, during like from the 50s to the 80s, is like there is basically main characters who are just like, I mean, presumably there's so many people that work for the CIA, right?
[00:54:01]  Like I'm not talking about like assets or whatever.
[00:54:03]  I'm talking like literally like you are, your paycheck comes from, or well, who knows where your paycheck is.
[00:54:08]  Bureaucrats.
[00:54:08]  Yeah, you work for them.
[00:54:11]  But even beyond bureaucrats, even like guys who smoke other guys, you know what I mean?
[00:54:15]  But it's like, there's like the same like 20 guys that just crop up in everything.
[00:54:22]  I mean, obviously some of them are like very high-ranked, you know, section heads, you know, et cetera.
[00:54:26]  But like, it will really, I mean, it's really a lot of main characters in the CIA.
[00:54:31]  Especially in that.
[00:54:32]  I'm looking forward to like the next, like in like 30 years, we get to find out who the main character, the 20 main characters are of this.
[00:54:40]  I think it's changed now.
[00:54:42]  I think that they're too anodyne and generic and interchangeable and that I have a hard time keeping them straight, to be honest.
[00:54:50]  If you talk about Clapper or Comey, all these different officials that are in that realm, Hayden is not the same.
[00:54:59]  They don't have verb.
[00:55:00]  They don't make him like Cole.
[00:55:01]  Comey's got no verve, but there's a certain like patheticness to him.
[00:55:05]  He's like a hang dog.
[00:55:06]  Yeah, he always looks wet, first of all.
[00:55:08]  He does.
[00:55:09]  He looks like he's always come in from the rain and his trench coat is wet.
[00:55:13]  He has the posture of a wet man.
[00:55:15]  Well, he did throw the election so that the CIA could put, well, the White Hats and the CIA could put Hillary and Guantanamo finally.
[00:55:23]  Because of the United States of Africa.
[00:55:26]  Well, that's, of course, the Gaddafi faction within the CIA, which is a more recent thing because of DEI and third world studies at universities.
[00:55:34]  But It is so interesting that, like, I mean, some of these guys, not to Valorize them or anything, but like Engleton is fascinating, right?
[00:55:44]  Yeah, like even the way he looked, they don't even really make guys that look like that anymore.
[00:55:48]  He looks like a cigarette.
[00:55:50]  That's what killed him.
[00:55:51]  Yeah.
[00:55:53]  And, but, well, that's science isn't settled on that.
[00:55:57]  But he, it's like, yeah, like Engleton are like, you know, why isn't there all these fucking guys?
[00:56:04]  They're kind of like, I mean, they were, I guess, kind of a lot of them were just Italian, but like they, they, like, they had these sort of like outsized personalities.
[00:56:11]  Sturgis, his client.
[00:56:12]  Sturgis, yeah.
[00:56:13]  Oh, my God.
[00:56:14]  He's shark.

=== Why David Talbot Matters (04:43) ===

[00:56:15]  Yeah.
[00:56:15]  David Morales.
[00:56:16]  He's a, he was an character.
[00:56:18]  But now it's just like they all kind of just look like skinnier versions of Mike Pompeo.
[00:56:24]  You know what I mean?
[00:56:25]  Like they don't look like Comey, like any of those guys.
[00:56:28]  Comey could be any number.
[00:56:30]  If you told me that like you show me a picture of James Comey, you'd be like, yeah, this guy's in charge of like what name the department.
[00:56:35]  I'd be like, yeah, I believe you.
[00:56:36]  I don't know.
[00:56:37]  They all look like that.
[00:56:38]  It's like everybody's like Jessica Chastain's character in Zero Dark 30.
[00:56:42]  Yeah.
[00:56:42]  Just like very, like that was like the sexed up like Hollywood version of it.
[00:56:47]  Like interesting as they could make it.
[00:56:48]  Yeah.
[00:56:49]  It was just like very, very boring.
[00:56:51]  But at least now we have a lot more like, you know, DHS, I feel like that's where like the real Goombas are.
[00:56:58]  And like I said, Wild West over there, too.
[00:57:01]  Exactly.
[00:57:01]  Yeah.
[00:57:02]  Well, you don't need a high school degree or diploma.
[00:57:04]  Yeah, they'll take them.
[00:57:05]  You can do middle school and high school.
[00:57:07]  Imagine if they got running around over there.
[00:57:27]  So to get back to JFK a little bit, we're nearing the 60th anniversary of him having a cardiac incident in Texas.
[00:57:41]  And...
[00:57:41]  And, you know, as we talked about a little bit in this episode, and that probably many of our listeners just generally know, like, you know, this is still something that is still actively, you know, being covered up.
[00:57:54]  What's kind of, what's news in the cover-up world lately about this?
[00:57:59]  Well, there have been a number of stories in recent years that I think show that the cover-up is kind of wavering and it's happening in tandem with the decline of the U.S. Empire.
[00:58:09]  And that opens up some interesting possibilities.
[00:58:12]  There was the story in the New York Times about Paul Landis, who's a Secret Service agent.
[00:58:17]  And his story is kind of odd.
[00:58:19]  And I don't think I totally, it's a little, it's weird to try to figure out how much of it is accurate.
[00:58:26]  But his claim is that he was a Secret Service agent.
[00:58:30]  He came upon the limo and he saw brains splattered all over the back seat and he found a bullet back there.
[00:58:37]  And then he didn't know what to do, so he went to the hospital and then he set it on a stretcher there.
[00:58:41]  And that is what he claims is the origin of the magic bullet, Commission Exhibit 399.
[00:58:47]  Now, that's, and the New York Times reported on this and said, like, maybe there's more to this story than we know because this seems to actually falsify the magic bullet theory.
[00:58:56]  And oh my gosh, is it possible that we got this story wrong?
[00:59:00]  I don't know.
[00:59:01]  Now, why they're writing that now, and there are many other things that have come out in recent years that could have led them to speak about this, is to me fascinating.
[00:59:10]  And I don't know exactly why, but that's a really fascinating development of late.
[00:59:15]  You had Tucker Carlson, shortly before he was fired, he went on and said that we spoke to someone high in the CIA and they said that, and they've looked at the documents the CIA still is withholding.
[00:59:28]  And they told us that the CIA had some relationship with Oswald and that every CIA director since JFK was assassinated has known that the CIA was involved in the assassination and none of them have done anything about it.
[00:59:43]  And so that was, you know, it was on the highest rated cable news show that this was reported.
[00:59:48]  So that was pretty remarkable.
[00:59:50]  Whatever you think of Fox and Tucker Carlson, and I'm not a big fan of either of them, but that's a fascinating thing.
[00:59:57]  And then Tucker Carlson got fired.
[01:00:00]  When he was fired, he was actually supposed to be having Oliver Stone come on that week.
[01:00:04]  So I don't know if that has anything to do with it.
[01:00:06]  I don't really think it does, but that would have been a fascinating conversation.
[01:00:13]  And in general, what I think with the JFK assassination, the reason maybe the cover-up, and that I have a little bit of optimism about this, and the reason the media might be treating it a little bit differently.
[01:00:25]  For example, David Talbot is writing an op-ed on the anniversary itself.
[01:00:29]  Like they're giving David Talbot space to write about the Kennedy assassination.
[01:00:33]  He's one of the best people we have out there talking about that now.
[01:00:38]  And I think maybe the reason is, I put this forward in the book, and this is maybe, I'm not known for like, you know, flights of optimistic fancy that often, you know, but, and I don't necessarily think this is going to happen, but I put it as a possibility in American Exception at the end of the book.

=== Why The Consensus Must End (06:53) ===

[01:00:58]  When you look at why the assassination happened, it happened because Kennedy, in the previous episodes, we've talked more about his foreign policy and how he really did break with Eisenhower, the Eisenhower-Dullists consensus on U.S. imperialism.
[01:01:13]  And he really wanted more of a return to kind of a New Deal, almost like a Henry Wallace century of the common man kind of a thing, not the American century anymore.
[01:01:20]  I think he realized where this was heading and nuclear confrontation and so on.
[01:01:25]  He did actually support some third world nationalism as much as he could in the context of the Cold War.
[01:01:31]  And he came to recognize that the Cold War itself was an impediment to any economic or foreign policies that he would have wanted to be able to do.
[01:01:38]  And so he went right at it.
[01:01:39]  He went right at the Cold War.
[01:01:41]  And the Cold War had been established by an establishment consensus.
[01:01:46]  And he was going against that consensus.
[01:01:49]  And they decided that they would not allow him to overturn that consensus.
[01:01:53]  And so they used the clandestine apparatus that they had painstakingly constructed, along with all their media assets to cover it up, to get rid of this president.
[01:02:03]  And as a result, the U.S. continued to pursue its, and really ramped up under Johnson, brutal, murderous policies, killing millions of people in Indonesia, in Congo over the decades that would follow because of a change in policy.
[01:02:17]  The Vietnam War, of course, in Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia was catastrophic.
[01:02:21]  I mean, this had enormous consequences for human history.
[01:02:27]  But where are we now in 2023?
[01:02:29]  That empire seems to have run its course.
[01:02:33]  The other leaders in Russia and China are speaking more candidly about the U.S. as basically the big problem for world politics.
[01:02:42]  And when you look at every area where there's a major problem that you think, like, gosh, if only this could be solved, it all traces back to the U.S.
[01:02:49]  The U.S. put in an anti-Russian government right on Russia's doorstep intentionally to provoke Russia.
[01:02:55]  And that leads to this Ukraine war, which the U.S. insisted keep going rather than letting them sue for peace.
[01:03:01]  And now you have a half a million people slaughtered for nothing.
[01:03:04]  And it's wasted a ton of money and it's achieved none of the geopolitical goals that the U.S. set out to achieve.
[01:03:09]  They've withdrawn from Afghanistan.
[01:03:11]  They lost in Iraq.
[01:03:13]  They lost in Syria and are brazenly occupying Syrian territory in an imperialist fashion, stealing oil and so on.
[01:03:20]  And in Gaza now, you know, this is the other thing that gets launched at the end of World War II.
[01:03:26]  You not only have the insane U.S. Empire and the idea that the U.S. is going to rule the world in a friendly democracy way with a secret covert apparatus so they can still run it basically like colonialism.
[01:03:37]  Okay, that was one megalomaniacal holy war that was decided upon at the end of World War II, that the U.S. would do that.
[01:03:44]  It's been disastrous for the world.
[01:03:46]  And then there's the Zionism, which is on a smaller scale, but is similar, just Western imperial fascism that doesn't call itself fascism.
[01:03:57]  And I think that they have both run their course.
[01:04:00]  And the whole world is waiting for this to be sort of swept aside or to recede because the U.S. has waged a war against humanity.
[01:04:09]  And that was what Kennedy was trying to confront, not as Che Guevara, but as somebody working in that establishment.
[01:04:17]  And now that we are at the point that this empire is falling, then what's even the point of covering all this stuff up anymore?
[01:04:24]  It actually would be beneficial to allow some of this stuff to come out and see the light of day because it could almost function like a structural deep event in reverse, as Peter Del Scott talks about.
[01:04:35]  If you're running the U.S. Empire, you're running the U.S. government, you realize that the global dominance machine is no longer tenable.
[01:04:42]  What are you going to do to make the U.S. a functional polity, a functional political entity, when you've messed with people's minds so much for so long?
[01:04:50]  It's going to take something dramatic.
[01:04:52]  And I don't know that this will be the case, but it's interesting to think about this in light of the fact that they are, places like the New York Times are taking a more open-minded attitude about this.
[01:05:02]  Maybe we will see some kind of revelation about this.
[01:05:05]  And I think it would be very beneficial to us as we move forward to this next stage where we are not the headquarters of global fuckery, which is what we've been since the end of World War II.
[01:05:20]  You cannot overstate it that we are basically, and people don't want to admit this, and liberals and leftists, a lot of them, want to act like, oh, no, I have a more nuanced, sophisticated point of view.
[01:05:30]  And normally, I think it's hard to speak about things categorically in black and white terms.
[01:05:34]  But you don't really go too wrong if you just say we are categorically the bad guys of human history since the end of World War II.
[01:05:42]  If there is a bad guy, a villain of human history since the end of World War II, it's us.
[01:05:47]  And we don't know how to fix it.
[01:05:49]  We can't fix it democratically because if we elect someone they don't like, they'll just murder him in broad daylight.
[01:05:54]  So how do we do this?
[01:05:55]  Well, that empire is being defeated the same way all other empires are defeated by its foes externally.
[01:06:02]  And that may change things internally.
[01:06:04]  And that's where I'm fascinated to see what's going to happen with all of this because it's there.
[01:06:10]  It's right there in history.
[01:06:11]  And once you lose the power to rule the world and make all the money in the world, you probably lose the power to tell everybody how it's going to be forever.
[01:06:18]  Yeah.
[01:06:19]  I feel like even on the micro level, just looking at the CIA as an institution in American society, that they are able to continue to withhold basic information from the public and mislead the public about their relationship with the assassination of the president.
[01:06:39]  I think it reveals a lot about the political system, that they're unaccountable, essentially, and that all these very legitimate questions that people have just can't be answered.
[01:06:51]  I think that is pretty fundamentally revealing.
[01:06:56]  And I think that the more that people point out, you have these limited releases of information.
[01:07:04]  And at every step, even though they're stymieing that, every limited release of information is given more and more, it's just raised more and more questions about what was the CIA's role here.
[01:07:14]  There's more and more smoke being produced every time there are new documents.
[01:07:18]  I mean, thinking of the big, you know, the HSCA and the ARRB were the two big ones.
[01:07:23]  And so, you know, that's, I mean, I feel like getting those last documents released, no matter how you feel, like even if you disagree that Kennedy was killed by this, you know, milieu of CIA and Cuban exile and all that, even if you don't agree with that, it seems straightforward that there's no legitimate reason for the CIA to keep all these documents and they should just release them all.
[01:07:47]  And they're legally obligated to do so, so they may as well.

=== Otto Scorzini's Role (07:39) ===

[01:07:51]  You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen.
[01:07:53]  Release the documents.
[01:07:55]  I was just thinking we could put up some flyers.
[01:07:58]  Maybe like.
[01:07:59]  No, no, Liz.
[01:08:02]  We go around with billboard trucks and release the documents.
[01:08:07]  We could go out on the street with a sandwich board that says release the documents and start handing out flyers, maybe get into a fist fight with somebody.
[01:08:14]  I have a document, Brace, that I could, that we're going to release, that we have released.
[01:08:19]  We've released it.
[01:08:20]  What is it?
[01:08:21]  It is on the Four Died Trying website, and it is about one of your heroes growing up, Otto Scorzeni.
[01:08:30]  He's being sarcastic, ladies and gentlemen.
[01:08:32]  He's not.
[01:08:32]  I just find him a fascinating key.
[01:08:33]  I didn't know about the war stuff.
[01:08:35]  I just thought he was a really good cool scar.
[01:08:38]  Well, he did help your people once.
[01:08:40]  This is fascinating, actually.
[01:08:42]  He I say your people of your Jewish brothers.
[01:08:48]  He was in September of 1962.
[01:08:51]  He had been approached by Mossad earlier, and they said there's this Egyptian scientist guy, and he's German.
[01:08:59]  They might make some rockets and then Nash will shoot him at us.
[01:09:02]  Could you maybe deal with this guy, you know, and your own, using your own special Otto Scorzeni skills because you're a Nazi assassin.
[01:09:09]  And he was like, well, can you please take me off the list of war criminals?
[01:09:12]  Because I don't want to be hunted down by you guys.
[01:09:14]  And if you can do that, then I'll kill this scientist for you.
[01:09:17]  And they did.
[01:09:19]  He came, Scorzeni started working for Mossad.
[01:09:21]  And in September, they called him that favor.
[01:09:23]  And so they take this German scientist and they kill him and then they dissolve him in acid.
[01:09:30]  And that's that.
[01:09:33]  None deal.
[01:09:33]  And that same month, this is where it gets into the relevance of the Kennedy assassination.
[01:09:38]  That same month in Madrid, Otto Tenander's friend who has a podcast.
[01:09:44]  His name escapes me right now, but it's in the article.
[01:09:47]  He uncovered, he found a document in the West German BND files.
[01:09:53]  That's the West German intelligence agency.
[01:09:54]  Yeah, and they have an Otto Scorzeni file, and in there, they found a document.
[01:09:59]  A Air Force visitor went to, or an Air Force officer went to see Otto Scorzini in Madrid to talk to complain about President Kennedy.
[01:10:12]  And what the document says, among U.S. Army officers, or U.S. military officers, one is distraught over the politics of the current president and his close advisors.
[01:10:22]  The advisors are wusses who do not believe in the supremacy of the West over the East.
[01:10:27]  The election of Kennedy was a catastrophe which was achieved by bribery and corruption, which cannot be undone in one legislative session, etc.
[01:10:34]  Similarly, the officers are critical of the millions spent on Poland solely for elections or given to the N-word states, meaning African states, whose diaspora in the U.S. could be courted as voters.
[01:10:49]  So why is a high-ranking Air Force officer, maybe it's Curtis LeMay, maybe it's somebody else, but why would you go to talk to Otto Scorzini about your feelings about, I mean, he's not the shoulder to cry on or the, you know, the person to give you guidance.
[01:11:03]  Like, he's a person you go to if you want someone murdered.
[01:11:06]  Why was he visiting them to complain about that in September of 1962?
[01:11:11]  I think it's pretty fascinating.
[01:11:13]  And we've put that out on the Four Died Trying website.
[01:11:17]  And the documentary film is coming soon on the 22nd also that people should check out.
[01:11:23]  It deals with the four major political assassinations and they worked on it for like 10 years almost.
[01:11:28]  So it's cool to be, we're writing for them and we found this document.
[01:11:33]  And people had asked me in the past because I'd mentioned it on podcasts before and they said, post it, post it, post it.
[01:11:38]  So I finally, I did make a post for it and you can read it there.
[01:11:43]  Well, we'll definitely link to it.
[01:11:45]  This is like a great exercise and lesson to our listeners to always follow the documents, which is what we're always saying.
[01:11:51]  Always follow the documents and always ask for more documents.
[01:11:53]  Collect documents.
[01:11:55]  You don't even have to read them.
[01:11:56]  You should just be printing them out.
[01:11:57]  Just print them out.
[01:11:59]  Everything you see on the internet, print out.
[01:12:01]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:02]  Like any website that you've ever, that you go to, just, this is what I always do.
[01:12:06]  I just hit print, not to PDF, straight to the printer, and then file it away.
[01:12:11]  And if you don't have time to file it away, just stack it as high as you can.
[01:12:16]  I do kind of the old school routes where I subscribe to basically every major newspaper in the world and kind of just let them pile up in my house.
[01:12:23]  You never know when you're going to need some reading material, you know?
[01:12:26]  Exactly.
[01:12:26]  Well, what if something happened?
[01:12:28]  Yeah.
[01:12:28]  You know what I mean?
[01:12:29]  Like, we talked about a newspaper, you know, an article about Lee Harvey Oswald in last episode.
[01:12:36]  What if I need an article about?
[01:12:40]  It's impossible to predict.
[01:12:42]  Well, fellas, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:12:48]  My question is this.
[01:12:50]  And I've asked you this before.
[01:12:53]  What if we're wrong?
[01:12:55]  What if Lee Harvey Oswald was a committed, principled Marxist-Leninist who saw what was happening in Vietnam, who saw what was happening with the Bay of Pigs, and he was like, and he didn't know what was going on behind the scenes or anything like this.
[01:13:13]  He's like, I got to fucking stop this.
[01:13:17]  And then he blows Kennedy's head off in a one in a million motherfucking trick shot.
[01:13:22]  And now everybody thinks that he worked for the CIA.
[01:13:26]  I'm not even asking you, what if that was the case?
[01:13:28]  Just like, how would you feel if that was you?
[01:13:33]  If I were Lee Harvey Oswald.
[01:13:35]  And that was all true.
[01:13:35]  And you're in hell right now, by the way, because basically enough people don't like you, you go to hell.
[01:13:42]  Yeah.
[01:13:43]  People make that argument that, oh, you don't want to accept that some little guy could actually change history.
[01:13:51]  That one really pisses me off.
[01:13:53]  The argument where you can't say that the CIA overthrew this government in like Africa or something, because if you say that, you're taking away the agency of the people in this or that hypothetical African country.
[01:14:08]  People made similar arguments about Oswald that way.
[01:14:10]  And it always kind of, that one really pisses me off, those versions of that argument.
[01:14:14]  That is the next step of the cover story is that you make it, you manipulate the documentary out so you make it look like Oswald worked for the CIA.
[01:14:23]  Yeah.
[01:14:24]  So that therefore, and the only people who would take that seriously would be the left wing.
[01:14:28]  Yes.
[01:14:28]  And so you would make the left wing think that a committed marksman couldn't change the course of history in a single day.
[01:14:34]  It's like, oh, no, this is, it's actually bad to do stuff like that.
[01:14:37]  That's exactly right.
[01:14:38]  Only the CIA can do this.
[01:14:40]  Yep.
[01:14:41]  I think you're on it.
[01:14:42]  It's elitist.
[01:14:43]  It's one of that Yale fucking Ivy League elitist CIA Wall Street bullshit.
[01:14:48]  Leave it to the professionals.
[01:14:49]  So a guy who's five, four can't change the world?
[01:14:54]  You can.
[01:14:55]  You can.
[01:14:56]  Thank you.
[01:14:57]  Thank you.
[01:14:57]  You just have to get better at shooting.
[01:14:59]  Me?
[01:14:59]  I'm a fucking crazy good shot.
[01:15:02]  I would never shoot a president, to be clear.
[01:15:05]  And I would miss that one because my morals would be like, no, don't do it.
[01:15:12]  Because everyone think you're the CIA.
[01:15:14]  Well, it's Leon.
[01:15:15]  What's his fucking name?
[01:15:16]  Leon Grazglaw or whatever.
[01:15:18]  You know the motherfucker I'm talking about?
[01:15:20]  He shot – God, who did he shoot?
[01:15:24]  You know what I'm talking about.
[01:15:25]  Oh, the dude that shot McKinley?
[01:15:26]  Yeah, McKinley.
[01:15:27]  The guy has no pronunciation didn't help me.

=== Foolish Missions and Morals (01:37) ===

[01:15:31]  I'm sorry.
[01:15:31]  How do you pronounce it?
[01:15:32]  C-Z-O-L-G-O-S-Z.
[01:15:35]  No!
[01:15:36]  Well, yeah, true.
[01:15:38]  Fair enough.
[01:15:39]  Can you say it?
[01:15:39]  Can you say it?
[01:15:40]  Well, how do you say it?
[01:15:41]  No, I have no idea.
[01:15:42]  Oh, I was like, that's probably called like Slo-Slazga or whatever.
[01:15:46]  Yeah, Slo Slazga.
[01:15:47]  But everyone was like, he's an agent or whatever.
[01:15:51]  But he just was like simple, I think.
[01:15:54]  Actually, Shalgosh, I actually don't know much about him.
[01:15:57]  I would never have, I would have, if he, if that's correct, I would never have guessed that as pronunciation in a million years.
[01:16:03]  It was really hard to shoot someone back then, too, because guns didn't work that well.
[01:16:07]  And like, they were all like 0.18 caliber.
[01:16:12]  But you'll die if you get shot, though.
[01:16:14]  Infection will kill you, though.
[01:16:15]  That's true.
[01:16:16]  Yeah.
[01:16:16]  And, or if you, if you just, like, you don't have, you've never eaten protein.
[01:16:20]  So, like, if you, someone starts chasing you, they might die of just being tired.
[01:16:25]  All right.
[01:16:26]  No muscle mass.
[01:16:27]  I am going to bring peace to the world by using the restroom to pee immediately after this episode is done.
[01:16:35]  You don't want me to say that?
[01:16:36]  Okay.
[01:16:38]  Well, keep it in.
[01:16:41]  Ben, independent researcher Ben Howard.
[01:16:45]  And you're also an independent researcher, but political scientist, Aaron Good, and the host of the American Exception podcast.
[01:16:55]  We should sign off here.
[01:16:56]  Sure.
[01:16:56]  Thank you for joining us.
[01:16:57]  My name is Gretchen.
[01:17:01]  I'm Liz.
[01:17:02]  We are, of course, joined by Producer Yankomsky, and this has been Trunan.
[01:17:06]  We'll see you next time.
[01:17:08]  Bye-bye.