con-sara-cy theories

Episode 35: JFK - "The Secret KGB JFK *ssassination Files" Program

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will talk about a documentary I recently watched on Tubi titled The Secret KGB, JFK, pop, pop files. As of this recording, it was available to watch free of charge on Tubi. My disclaimer about that sometimes content comes and goes from Tubi, so hopefully by the time I publish this episode, it will still be available. It was

not what I was expecting. Spoilers lie ahead. So if you want to check it out, which I encourage you to do with all things, check this out first, formulate your own conclusions. See what you think spoilers lie ahead. So if you're still with me, I'm going to assume you're fine with that. I have my ginger ale ready to go. So let's saddle up and take this peculiar ride.

Funny enough, I had no real familiarity with this documentary at all to be just popped it up in my suggestions one day, and I have to say Tubi's algorithm is pretty good overall with its suggestions. It's sort of like, Hey, you're a weirdo and you like weird conspiracy theory crap. So have some more of it.

But having only seen the infographic, I did not know that Roger Moore was the narrator, slash host the very first entry here in my notebook under the title is randomly Roger Moore is the host. Exclamation point. I'm really like Roger. I was fortunate enough to get to meet him years ago on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. What a perfect backdrop. So I always like to tell people his random trivia. I met James Bond on Fifth Avenue in New York, he was so nice, very suave, you know, very cool. And you hear a lot of those stories about Roger Moore. People always say, don't meet your heroes, because you're usually going to be disappointed. In Roger's case, there are just so many wonderful stories of him signing autographs, being nice to kids who would come up and say, Hey, you're James Bond. I found him to be a very cool customer. So it was a nice added bonus that he was hosting this documentary. And guys, I'm not gonna bury my opinion on this one. That's about the most positive thing. I have to say. I don't know if maybe I just had my expectations up too high because I was excited. Like, okay, great. Maybe in the spirit of like Glasnost e peristroika, when the USSR breaks apart, there starts to be more transparency, at least. So we're told in the Western world, maybe we do in some Soviet era document dump, as things get declassified, especially since they would have been talking about something that happened in the 1960s in America. Not even something that happened in the Soviet bloc in recent times, but something that happened in 1960s America, Etta was mozna mojibwit. Maybe we're getting something that actually is new, fresh, revealing information. So I was legit pumped to watch this. And

yeah, I was disappointed.

All right, so I go through my notes. Allegedly Nikita whereabouts at the time of the JFK Pop Pop wasn't immediately clear. And then also allegedly LBJ was warned that he might also get pop. Popped Castro made an address to say that Cuba was not involved. He wants to get out in front of the thing quickly and disavow

the KGB files on JFK became accessible when the USSR breaks apart, they interview a retired KGB Chief of Operations named General Nikolai Leonov, and his contention straight away is that Oswald was a cover. So Oswald's own statement, I'm just a patsy Leonov appears to agree with that by calling Oswald just a cover. They also interview briefly, and this person is not featured super prominently in the program at all, but there are a few small segments with someone referring to himself as a former Charlie India Alpha agent. But he's interviewed in disguise, like his face is blurred out and the voice is distorted so that he sounds like Satan. I'm like, Okay, well, I mean, we really don't even since, since this person is covered up, we really don't even know the accuracy of this. We're just having to take the documentary's word for it. We learned that the KGB has even performed its own ballistics test. The media immediately starts to push the connection. But.

Between Oswald and the USSR. And this is something that's already known information, right, that Oswald had defected, that he was supposed to have been a communist sympathizer. There's a video of him saying, Well, I'm not necessarily communist, but I am a Marxist. And then he's found to be distributing pro Castro literature. Now, obviously the argument is he was sheep dipped to look any way they wanted him to. One day, he's anti Castro. The next day, he's pro Castro. He's defecting to the USSR, but then he's coming back, and he's allowed to come back that the whole ball of wax with Oswald and his backstory is bizarre to say the least, so the KGB wants to perform its own investigation to refute the idea that the USSR was involved in this, especially because of the media push to really show Hey, Oswald was some deranged communist sympathizer. They don't want to take the blame for it and have like World War Three get sparked off some kind of nuclear annihilation over what has happened.

They also interview a retired KGB chief of foreign intelligence named General Oleg Callaghan, and he says there was a directive from Moscow to pick up people like not even necessarily diplomats per se, but any sort of person representing the UN or the US to say the USSR didn't do it. Now he mentions specifically the mafia and right wingers. Maybe it was them, but it wasn't us. And I'm like that in and of itself, sounds a little bit sketchy and weird to me, because if I were an expat working in a foreign country, and then something bad happened in America, and some random agent in that foreign country came up to me and said, Hey, I just want you, want you to know we disavow we didn't have anything to do with it. K bye, I'd be like, this is way more suspicious than if you hadn't bothered me today. So I find that weird man and mafia and right wingers, it must have been them that did it.

Oswald is then killed by Ruby. We don't get a trial, and we don't know what was going on in Oswald's head, because he's deceased.

There's this question of, was the carousel club controlled by the mafia? Did the Dallas Police Department furnish the Boomstick that Ruby used in order to kill Oswald, and these are just questions lingering in the air. Mark Lane, who created rush to judgment and plausible denial? I've talked about him on the broadcast before. He is interviewed as part of this documentary, and he asserts that there was a time when you couldn't tell where the Charlie India Alpha ended and the mafia began. And he also charges that the Charlie India Alpha was using the mob to get pop poppers.

All right, so it's kind of like point counterpoint. One, one positive thing I will say for this documentary, other than Roger Moore randomly being the narrator of it is that I think there is effort made to have people on the program who support the official narrative that Oswald was a lone nut, communist pop Popper, or he was just crazy, who in the hell knows what his motives were. He was a freaking nut, but he acted alone, and he did it from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a crappy mail order Boomstick. You have people that are in that line of thought, but then you also have skeptics. They do interview critics in this documentary who don't believe in the the official account of things, Gerald Posner who definitely is in alignment with the official narrative, is one of the guests on this documentary. You may know already that he wrote the book case closed, and he was lauded for that. He comes to the conclusion that yes in the pop pop of JFK, Oswald acted alone, and then in the subsequent pop of Oswald, Jack Ruby acted independently and CASE CLOSED was a best seller, I think, on the New York Times, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Boy is your boy? So Posner gives us the narrative of a little guy wanting to be somebody like Oswald was this little shrimpy nobody, but he wanted to be somebody, and that's a possible motive for why he popped JFK.

So as we know, Ruby kills Oswald, and then Oswald is quickly buried. Ruby has a trial. He appeals and wants a new trial, but then he dies of cancer. Calligan says that defections from the US to the USSR were very rare back in the day, they were very rare outside of spies who needed to come back. So there is this large question mark as to what.

Exactly what the hell was Oswald doing if he's not involved in the spy community, then why did he go over there? Then why did he become disillusioned and come back again? Why was he allowed to come back?

There's a retired chairman of the KGB, general Vladimir simechasni, and he says that he considered Oswald to be mediocre. He didn't see any potential to use Oswald as a spy or counter agent, and he claims that the Soviets got no good information from him.

Callaghan claims that Oswald was not Charlie India Alpha. I mean, they really have this narrative of Oswald being just a nobody

politically, they give Oswald a break on a temporary basis because he has a suicide attempt. And they say that the KGB, when I say, they say the KGB, representatives here say that they did not want any kind of Fallout or political blame. It was easier to just after he has this suicide attempt to let him stay a little bit longer instead of causing some giant kerfuffle about an American expat is in the USSR, and he's been treated horribly.

Calligan labels Oswald as a misfit and says that he doesn't fit in in the USSR either, like he didn't fit in in America. He doesn't fit in in the USSR, either. So he leaves and, quote, starts to think of something else. So it's almost like

Oswald is portrayed as a drifter, a searcher, somebody that's looking for something, some kind of something, is seeking and not finding. So he decides to just move on. Oh, I think maybe I'll stir the shit pot by defecting to the USSR. Oh, now I don't like it over here, and nothing exciting is happening, so I guess I'll go back and try to think of something else.

Now this is just a note from from my own thoughts here some of the photos that they show in this documentary that are supposed to be of Oswald and Marina, it doesn't even look like Oswald to me. I mean, I would encourage you to take a look for yourself, see what you think. But to me, the photos don't even really look like Oswald. So I'm like, Well, who is this guy? I mean, there have been theories that there were people impersonating Oswald, and even accusations that Oswald was supposedly two or three places at one time, at the same time, which we know is impossible.

Gerald Posner labels Oswald as having one failure after another, and I have written in my notes, he's creating a narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald was just one perpetual fuck up, because that's that's what we're supposed to think.

They talk again to general Leonov, and he is the retired KGB Chief of Operations. He says, In september 1963

Oswald goes to Mexico. Leonov was stationed there. Oswald says that he's under surveillance, and he's scared. He's worried that something bad will happen to him if he doesn't go back to the USSR. He pulls out a revolver. First impression was that he was mad, crazy. Oswald is nervous. His hands are shaking, and he gets hostile when he doesn't get his way. So Oswald brings up Cuba as perhaps being more hospitable, like if you can't help me get back to the USSR, then maybe the Cubans will help me go there.

So when he fails in this mission, he goes back to the USA.

Simi chasney says that he believes that Kennedy was popped from both the front and the back.

At about 34 minutes in, we get to the story of the grassy knoll, and it really becomes Posner versus lane. Posner says modern weapons are smokeless, and it was probably just a puff of motorcycle exhaust, because, you know, there are witnesses who say that they saw activity on or around, like behind or in front of, I should say, the picket fence at the grassy knoll. And one of the things that several witnesses report is the puff of smoke. And Posner is saying, well, that's probably bull, because modern weapons are smokeless. So why? It could have been

a puff of motorcycle exhaust that they actually saw. Robert McClelland is also in this documentary for a short period of time, and he he was one of the doctors at Parkland Hospital that saw Kennedy when he came in,

and he describes the hole in the back of Kennedy's head, although the autopsy photos do not show such a thing.

Posner says that autopsy X rays and photographs are the best evidence, and if those are not forgeries, then they are the best evidence that we should be using, according to him, also, according to him, those tools have been.

And tested every way to Sunday to show they haven't been tampered with.

They show us precisely, in photographs where the wounds are. And I'm sitting here like, okay, these things have been tested every way to Sunday, according to him, to show that they're not forgeries. They show us exactly where the wounds are.

I don't know how you reconcile that with what the doctors at Parkland saw. Mean how, and how you reconcile that with what happens on the Zapruder film if he had a hole in the back of his head and then he gets to Bethesda and he doesn't that's freaking weird. Something was tampered with somewhere, in my opinion.

Of course, now they bring in Cyril wecht, who disagrees, and he's been an outspoken critic of the autopsy, the way that the body was handled, the photos, the X rays, etc. So again, they are trying, I think, to give some kind of a balanced portrayal here, and Cyril wecht talks about how Dr Rose is picked up by the armpits, at least, I think it was him. It may have been McClellan, but one of them talks about how Dr Rose is picked up by the armpits so that Kennedy's body can be moved from Parkland to Bethesda, even though,

like jurisdictionally, legally, the autopsy should have happened there in Dallas, because that's where Kennedy was murdered. No, we don't want civilians doing this. He's going to Bethesda. The KGB opinion becomes from first impressions that it was an orchestrated plan performed by more than one person.

Posner paints Oswald like if we think back to the spark of World War One, if we think back to Gavrilo Princip, who pop popped Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example.

Like, according to Posner,

Oswald, wasn't really a commie. He was more like an anarchist, and he's an anarchist that wants to go down in the history books. So I'm like, okay, haven't we heard this story before? Isn't that you know what we're always told sparked off World War One? That should be another episode, because who knows what theories abound about what really happened there that we're not told in our history books.

Mark lane, on the other hand, says we can see the footprints of intelligence, meaning the agencies, the intelligence agencies around Oswald and like Jim Garrison, Mark Lane also says that he believes that Oswald was sheep dipped, to be honest with you, so do I, because he's pro Castro. He's anti Castro. He's in with anti Castro Cubans that abhor Kennedy and think that the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco is this giant disaster. But then he's also handing out pro Castro leaflets. I mean, he defects to the USSR, but then he gets to come back. There's just a lot of weird, unexplained things that are connected to Oswald, and I feel like they're only unexplained. If you assume that all of these things happen by random chance, if what lane is saying is correct and we see the footprints of intelligence, then it makes a whole lot more sense.

They also interview Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai martinikov, who is part of the Russian Federal Police ballistics team, and he says due to the laws of physics, the exit wound is always bigger than an entrance wound. Now that's not to say that they think Oswald didn't do it, or that the pop pops didn't happen from behind JFK. He's just making the general blanket statement that, due to the laws of physics, an exit wound is always bigger than an entrance wound.

They also interview Lieutenant Felix viscobov with the Russian Federal Police ballistics team. Also, he says, the initial movement of forward motion then going back, this is just inertia and has nothing to do with the bullets. Okay.

Okay.

They say they can't confirm that it was Oswald who did the Pop Pop, but it's possible that it was a lone nut. They also tell us that Oswald did train with boomsticks, so maybe he had the skill after all. See, that's like, think about rush to judgment and how Mark Lane interviews Nelson Delgado, and Delgado confirms that Oswald was not some kind of master Boomstick operator with fantastic aim and fantastic skill. In fact, he was made fun of in the military for his lack of skill. But hey, we've got the KGB claiming that, according to Marina, according to what they knew, that Oswald did have training, he did practice, so maybe he was a more skillful marksman than what any of us think. Also, according to them, the KGB, in their experiments, they were able to use.

A Boomstick and get off the number of shots within six seconds. And I have written in my notes that's quite something, because American based tests didn't go as well. Lol. For this television show, they have a marksman who claimed that he was average. This is, this is the the marksman's claim to us is that he's an average shot, and he was able to get three rounds off in six seconds or less and hit stationary targets in the head and neck area. So for an average marksman using a bold action Boomstick, Wow, he's really doing the damn thing.

They show

an undercover transaction attempt to get secret documents, which I also found kind of funny. It reminded me of something that would be in a movie, for sure. Less in a documentary, more in a movie. And they show, I don't know producer or representative, somebody offering $5,000 to get these secret documents from alleged black market document dealers, but then they demand more cash, and there's a scuffle.

I laughed out loud a couple of times at that. I'm like, There's TV for you. There has to be some drama.

Leonov says that he still has questions about whether Oswald did it, and he doubts that Oswald was a lone nut pop popper.

They also interview a retired KGB, Colonel Ilya Pavlovsky.

He says there was a special section for analysis in the KGB that concluded that Oswald didn't do it, and they believed that Oswald was, and I quote, incompetent. Seema chasney says that Texas magnets, like oil magnets, rich rich folk, rich oil barons in Texas were probably involved. And he thinks that Kennedy's pursuit of peace, particularly that he was going to try to negotiate with the USSR. He wasn't just going to blow the USSR to hell, but he was trying to pursue peace. He was trying to negotiate peace with the Soviets, along with making life harder for rich people, led to his murder, and Simi chasse says you could call it a coup d'etat, but you could also say it's a substitution, so that LBJ could be in control.

To me, I'm like itaki should. What's the difference? Six in one half a dozen in the other so we'll call it a substitution conditional. Leonov points the finger at anti Castro exiles in Florida, we get this interview. And this is one of the things that's like, promoted at the commercial breaks and stuff like, Oh, we're gonna have this exclusive interview with Gorbachev. Oh, and I'm sitting here like, well, that's really cool, man. Well, imagine we get to hear Gorbachev's ideas about what happened in the JFK? Pop, pop, well, that's another letdown, in my opinion, because he has very little screen time in this documentary. You get all hyped up thinking that he's going to come out and say something really

drastic, and he doesn't.

He says that he felt that JFK showed great promise, and he says that he feels the fate of the world would have been different had Kennedy lived I mean, that is that is a huge statement coming from somebody who had been involved in Soviet politics. You can also read some articles online about how Gorbachev felt that Kennedy and Kennedy's administration really inspired his push towards Glasnost, deeper historica and tearing down the Iron Curtain. I mean, that's the super inspirational, but it doesn't give us like, okay, here, here's the thing, here's some big revelation that's going to change the game. I mean, it's just, well, JFK showed great promise. We can certainly draw a line. However, of you have someone like Gorbachev who mean we have to go back to the Cold War era in think about in the height of Cold War tensions. Even think about prior or later, I should say, think about moving forward in time, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall, think about the impact of a Soviet leader saying, I admire this American president. I admire what he was doing. Had he lived the whole world would have been a different place. That's not an insignificant comment. Now it doesn't tell us anything directly about the Pop Pop, although, as I started to say a moment ago, we could draw a direct line. This person was committed to peace. This person wanted to end the Cold War. This person wanted to try to make the world better than he found it for all of his foibles, for all of the things about the.

Man that that show us he was selfish and rude and crass, and believe me, there are plenty of examples out there that show us that he was a philanderer and at times, a complete no good, a ne'er do well for all of his flaws and foibles, he was at least trying his damnedest to not blow up the world he was trying to leave the overall world in a better place than he found it. Maybe his personal relationships were trash in some situations, but he was trying to make a move to not blow up the world, and to keep the war hawks who were around him from blowing up the world. So when we think about Gorbachev saying that he showed great promise, and the fate of the world would have been different had he lived. That's not an insignificant statement, and it does indirectly tell us about the Pop Pop maybe, in fact, people who wanted to hit the red button, maybe people that wanted the Cold War to keep going, they wanted Vietnam to escalate, maybe they did have something to do with this.

Mark Lane points at the Charlie India. Alpha

Pavlovsky says that he thinks, and again, Colonel Pavlovsky is the retired KGB. Colonel

Pavlovsky says that he thinks that French and Vietnamese Agents were involved because of the supply of opium having been involved. I will divert just for a second and read a little portion from this article on the Office of Justice Programs titled heroin trafficking in the Golden Triangle, heroin became a major component of the opium trade after World War Two, and the demand for heroin by United States troops during the Vietnam War helped transform the opium economy of the Golden Triangle into a large and profitable heroin economy. Drug trafficking now influences every aspect of politics in the region. End Quote, so this is what

pavlotsky is talking about, this idea that Diem and his brother had ties to opium and thereby heroin trafficking. I think he says they're involved with like the Marseille mob, like they're they're able to get opium to the Marseille mob, and then they then refine it into heroin and sell it.

He fingers this guy named Michelle Mertz, and says that he believes that Mertz was hired with the cooperation of American mobsters in order to pop, pop JFK. There has a book. There was a book that was written, I think, titled The French Connection, or something like that. Hang on and I'll look it up. Yes, it's called JFK, the French Connection by Peter cross. And this, this narrative we also hear, at least to some degree, in the Docu series the men who killed Kennedy, that there may have been some connection to, like the Marseille mafia, to Corsican drug traffickers, and then they may have also had ties to the American mob, etc. So according to pavlotsky, he thinks that Michelle Mertz may have been hired with cooperation of American mafia to pop, pop JFK.

We then see that they conduct. There's a group that conducts an experiment with lasers. So this is not the kgbs ballistics tests. This is a group of Americans that have decided to go to Dealey Plaza with mannequins and an exact duplicate. So we're told of the Presidential limousine to conduct an experiment using laser beams. Anthony Larry Paul is the ballistics expert, and if that name sounds familiar to you, it's because he was an actor, an actor turned ballistics expert. And I just have three dots, an ellipsis and a question mark, like weird, but hey, you know, there's no law that says you can't change your profession. Robert Groden is also at the laser experiment. He's critical of the Warren Commission Report. He's also featured, I believe, in the Docu series the men who killed Kennedy.

They do crime scene reconstruction.

They feature Heinz thummel, who has been integral in laser devices for boomsticks, also the manufacturing of laser devices used by the military.

They bring in professional land surveyors to help with the setup. I mean, it appears to be a pretty legitimate reconstruction. They also have to get the parks department involved, because there are tree limbs that exist at that time in 1999 1998 1999 when this was done, but those same limbs were not there in 1963

so it seems to me that they're trying to have some sort of accurate recreation. They're just using laser beams instead of actual boomsticks.

And as one of the commentators there says, what we're trying to do is eliminate the impossible so that we can.

To the truth. Roger Moore points out tempers flared. I also wrote lol about that, because there's some going back and forth between Paul and Groton about, like the grassy knoll and getting everything set up appropriately. And that's one of the reasons why I think, like, you're never going to get complete consensus people that have an interest in the JFK, pop, pop, whether they admired the man's life or they hated the man's guts, they just see a conspiracy here. Whatever the situation may be, however somebody comes into this topic, and believe me, there are many ways

you're never going to have complete consensus. I just don't see that happening.

So Roger Moore remarks, timbers flared in this experiment. Again. There's not 100% agreement between everybody, but the general consensus is that the first shot could have been fired from the sixth floor of the Book Depository. It's also possible that at least one of the shots came from the second floor of the Dow Tex building. Robert Groden is like the resident skeptic for the laser test, and he wants a test performed from the grassy knoll. And Paul argues that he thinks the grassy knoll is not really the most optimum spot there because it's partly blocked by street sign, and he also thinks that the windshield would have been knocked out. Paul also eliminates the storm drain because he thinks that it would have taken too long to reload. You've got a small area like it would just be highly improbable. It's not impossible, but just highly improbable that anybody would have stationed a pop popper inside the storm drain, because it's just not an optimum location for doing what needs to be done down there. Now, for my money, just because something seems improbable doesn't mean it didn't happen. I think that it's worthwhile to look at the picket fence and the grassy knoll, because you do have so many witnesses who say the same basic thing. Maybe they're all under a mass delusion, or maybe they really saw something up there. It's worth it to do a test to figure out. Is this even feasible? Would it happen this way? I mean, if, depending upon the angle and where JFK was hit, you wouldn't necessarily be firing through the windshield. So to me, that argument doesn't really hold water. But you know, Paul and Groton kind of get into it. And there's even this one scene where Grodin is talking about like the movement of the body, and Paul is arguing with him about the momentum and the laws of physics, and he makes this statement about, I could take a cadaver and just hang it and blast at it with a 12 gage pop pop or 1212 gage Boomstick, and it wouldn't move around. The way that you're talking, you're seeing things like from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies,

which, how do you respond to that? If somebody's like, Well, I think you're full of it. I think you've been watching too many movies. That's really not an invitation to consider the dialog continuing.

They also, in this laser beam test, are using the official autopsy photos to guide them, and Paul concludes that the only real evidence points to the Texas School Book Depository. So in a nutshell, what you're really left with when you watch this documentary is the preponderance of evidence suggests that the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository. You know, maybe it was Oswald, maybe it wasn't. If it was him, maybe he acted alone, maybe he had help. We just don't know. We'll have to wait for more documents to be declassified, but overall, I think it skews heavily towards the official narrative. There's no

There's no wow factor here. You're not going to see anything watching this documentary that completely rocks your world, in my opinion. For me, Roger Moore was the highlight. That was the main highlight. Yeah, okay, it was nice to hear Gorbachev say, I think that, I think that things could have been different, because that's that's a nice statement, whether that's true or not. You know, you're gonna have the Seymour Hershey's and the Noam chomskys who say that's bullshit. He was a war hawk. He was gonna do the same old, same old. He would have gone to Vietnam. Y'all need to pull your heads out of your liberal buttholes and quit mythologizing this guy.

It's a nice statement. It's a nice sentiment to think about somebody that was a former Soviet leader saying something deferential to an American president, instead of saying something hateful and propagandized.

Decide for yourself. You know, if you have an hour to kill watching to be this. This could be a good expenditure of your time, or you may watch it and come to the same conclusion that I did, that, in essence, Roger Moore was the best part of it. Stay a little crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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