con-sara-cy theories

Episode 62: JFK - Hugh McDonald, the KGB, and "Saul"

• Sara Causey • Episode 62

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

JFK assassination, Hugh McDonald, conspiracy theories, Lee Harvey Oswald, Saul, KGB, Bay of Pigs, Warren Commission, Herman Kimsey, Barry Goldwater, Soviet bio weapons, Robert Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, LBJ, CIA.

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 be talking about a book published by Hugh C McDonald in 1975 titled appointment in Dallas, the final solution to the pop pop of JFK. I did not know anything about this book. Did not know anything about Hugh McDonald. I found it just by chance at a second hand store, and thought, all right, I'll give it a whirl, see what this is about. And it is definitely a long, strange trip, if you will. If you've not read the book, but you intend to spoilers lie ahead. There's no way for me to talk about his conclusions without going through the book. So if you intend to read this and you have not yet, I don't want to spoil anything for you, download this episode or bookmark it and come back to it later. In the meantime, we will saddle up and take this ride according to the back cover of this paperback. Hugh C McDonald is a veteran of over 40 years in law enforcement. His credentials from Charlie India Alpha contract agent to Chief of Detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office to head of security for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are impeccable. End quote, hmm, an agency, contract agent. I wonder how much truth we're going to get in this book. I wonder. I wonder. So the beginning pages really are a little bit self aggrandizing. I think it's like a partial resume of all these different things that he's done, all of these places that he's worked. I guess, apparently, one of his claims to fame was that he held the patent for the identikit and the identicator, which were those criminal identification systems like, what kind of nose, what kind of lips, what kind of eyes, when they're trying to take a description of the perpetrator? He actually opens the book, Dallas, Texas, mid afternoon, September, 1964 where he is going to be involved in providing security for Senator Goldwater's presidential campaign against LBJ so he starts talking to this guy, Herman Kimsey, and Herman is just like, I'm trying to tell you that JFK was murdered from that building, and not by Lee Harvey Oswald, and I'm telling it to you because I owe it to you. I work for you. Now you need to know what really happened in JFK that day, because in order for us to adequately protect Barry Goldwater from somebody doing something similar, you need to know the real truth about what happened, which to me, you know, hey, this is just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but even the groundwork for this seems a little bit flimsy. It's almost like, well, who does that? Who would just be like, Hey, I know that we're on this assignment, and I wouldn't normally tell you this top secret information, but we've got to protect Goldwater, and so I want to really let you know what actually happened to JFK that day in Dallas. I'm just to me. It's not hitting my ear with a lot of authenticity. It seems a little bit sketch. So in this story, Kimsey takes McDonald and points out the county records building and says to him, now listen, that man shot and killed President John Kennedy from the second floor of that building, I have the whole story. He told it to me, and you damned well better believe it. You McDonald said, have got to be crazy, but you're going to tell me all of it, Herman, every goddamn word. We're going back to the hotel now. So from there we go into this story. Set, April 27 1961 where there had been like the aftermath it all because he starts out this chapter. It all began three years earlier, during the tense aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where Hugh MacDonald has gone to the Charlie India alpha and everything is in shambles. Basically, in this scenario, McDonald is in Herman Kinsey's office at the agency, and some man comes into the room and choose Kimsey out. And Kimsey tells McDonald that this man is a pop Popper, maybe one of the best there is. And he works for a lot of people. And there's some foreshadowing here, Ryan in a literary sense, hmm, this pop popper is probably going to come back into the picture at some point in the book. Hugh McDonald. Shows pictures of this man that he calls Saul. And he's very clear in saying, like, that's just the nickname that he had mentally assigned to this man. And he uses Warren Commission exhibit 237, which I will drop a link to it so that you can read the entirety of this exhibit if you want to and then also see the photographs that Hugh MacDonald uses in the book of this so called, unidentified man who apparently has been called a variety of things, including Saul and I think is later identified as somebody else entirely, who the hell knows, this gets kind of crazy, because in the archives, we're told that this could be Yuri Ivanovic, mosko Lev, but then it's also aka Saul, who the hell knows. All right, so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, because the action really doesn't start to heat up until 1970 It was only after Robert Kennedy's killing that Hugh MacDonald became completely convinced that sooner or later he would have to find Saul and prove or disprove Herman Kim's story. He couldn't live with himself if he didn't in the meantime, he waited for the next assignment, which would take him to Europe. So now we're in september 1970 in London, England, and he gets told about this creepy Soviet Installation In the Aral Sea. So in the midst of trying to search for this mystery pop, popper named Saul Hugh MacDonald is allegedly bouncing all over Western Europe, meeting with various other spies from other spy organizations, and he's trying to find Ostro vos brazenia, which means rebirth island in the Aral Sea, because it's This Soviet Installation where there had been bio weapons testing, and they had supposedly developed a wide variety of viruses. And I guess some defectors had been infected with these viruses. I think that Hugh McDonald describes meeting somebody who goes through all kinds of bizarre sicknesses, radiation sickness, etc, and the way that he describes his symptoms pretty harrowing. So in the midst of him trying to track down people and elements involved in this Soviet bio weapons installation, he's also asking people from these various spy organizations about how he can potentially meet Saul. McDonald has another meeting with Herman Kimsey, and he's not in very good health, says that he's going to have to have open heart surgery, and is scared he won't even leave the hospital alive. So McDonald and Kimsey get into this conversation about Saul, and Kimsey is like, Hey, I think maybe you should just drop it. Just assume that it was Lee Harvey Oswald that did it, and let go of this Saul idea, which McDonald refuses to do. So allegedly, Kimsey says to him, Listen, Hugh, the Russians let Oswald into the Soviet Union. Why the guy's a psychopath. The Russians can recognize a psychopath as quickly as we can. The Russians are all psychopaths. So there's some cold war propaganda for you, right? Wow. The Russians are all psychopaths. They then let him marry a Soviet girl. Why? Usually they kick a foreigner out if he expresses any such intention. And this is no ordinary Soviet girl. She has a university degree. The Soviet Union has spent many years and a lot of money on her. She is a state investment. And then the KGB let them both out, both Hugh Oswald was programmed to kill like a medium and a seance. Then the mechanism went on the blink, and Oswald became a dangerous toy without direction, popping off at the wrong people like General Walker and ultimately the President of the United States. That's what happened. Do you believe this? Kimsey sighed and shrugged resignedly. Jesus, you're a stubborn bastard. And he looked ineffably weary. End quote. At this point, the gloves come off a little bit more, and Kimsey says to him, after I'm dead, say what you like, I cannot help you. Contact Saul, because I haven't the strength or the energy, but listen to me, Hugh, for your own good, I believe there are certain private interests involved who will destroy you. If you keep on, they may not kill you. They will try to ruin your reputation and your credibility. You are now a private businessman. Suddenly, you will find yourself with no customers. Suddenly you will get unexpected income tax audits, the Charlie India alpha and the Foxtrot Bravo India will not use you anymore. A helicopter you fly will crash and alcohol will be found on your breath, heroin and LSD in your apartment. Some babe you lay will accuse you of rape, any or all of these things will happen. Take my word for. For it. If you still persist, they will eliminate you. They have too much at stake to let you run around loose. That's what I believe, and you better believe it too. The words were chilling. Hugh MacDonald knew that this man and knew the depths of his contacts. Who are these people? Herman, what you seem to be saying is that you know even more about the pop, pop of Kennedy than what Saul told you. Kimsey sweated some more and said hoarsely, I know that the scheme which Saul described could not possibly have been activated successfully without help from very high places in this country, it isn't Saul you are taking on. Hugh, forget Saul. The threat from him could be removed damn fast. You could kill him before he could kill you, but the other people, hell, you don't even know who they are, and they could be employing me for all you know, and I wouldn't know who they were either. End quote

 

as spy fi goes,

 

This isn't bad, but if we're expected to believe Saul was really the ultimate killer,

 

and

 

Oswald was a psychopath. He was some kind of Manchurian Candidate, but he came back without direction and was aimless and was crazy, popping off at everybody, from General Walker to the POTUS. It's kind of like, wait a minute, we're starting to beggar some belief here. So after this game of cat and mouse getting false leads trying to find Saul, giving up for a while, going back to it. Finally, Hugh McDonald and Saul meet up in London in 1972 and Saul begins by talking about Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs, various places he's lived. I was in the US for a while. I was in Southern California. Then I was back in Mexico, various places that he's been over the years. And Saul tells him the story of being in Haiti in May of 1963 to get a contract on a very high level person from some businessman didn't know the man's real name, knew that he had some connection to Detroit, so he usually just called him Troy. So again, here we go with, like, these weird nicknames, Saul, but it's not really Saul. And then somebody named Detroit that's just called Troy, but he's not really named Detroit. He's a businessman that has some connection with Detroit. So allegedly, Saul gets hired to do this very high level hit and figures out that it's on JFK. In Saul's story, Oswald is a patsy who's going to be in on the plan, but doesn't really understand what will truly happen. According to Hugh MacDonald. Saul says in this case, Troy told me his friend would actually fire several shots from a boom stick, aiming the boom stick close to the president. He said this man had no knowledge of the pop, pop plot, but would believe that he was in the pay of the Charlie India Alpha. He was firing the shots only to demonstrate to the president how vulnerable he was when he was not using his protective equipment or paying no attention to the instructions of the service the friend would actually be firing cover for me. That is to say I would wait for his shots fire immediately under them, and provided I fired quickly enough, no one would really hear my shots. End quote, according to McDonald, Saul tells him about the day, the day on my walk to Dealey Plaza on the morning of the 22nd the weapon was strapped to my upper body, under the right armpit and the barrel extending down into the right pants leg. This was nothing new. It was a procedure I had used before. When I was on assignment, I wore loose, almost baggy trousers, held up by suspenders, no belt. There was no possible way anyone could detect that I was carrying a boom stick. The ammunition I used was very high velocity, not explosive, but rather a disintegrating type. What I mean to say is when the bullet struck any hard object, including a human skull, it shattered into fragments. I usually prefer this type of ammunition because it denies any possibility of ballistic comparison to match the weapon with the bullet. Later on, I will describe what happens at the actual instant of the shooting and how important this type of bullet becomes in the overall explanation of the pop pop.

 

And I'm sitting here like, Who talks like this?

 

Who would get into that kind of minutia and detail? Now, later on, I'm going to tell you exactly why that's important. That just sounds so incredibly fishy to me. Sara goes on to allegedly say, walking from my hotel, the Boomstick caused me to limp. I had limped on arrival. It was a deliberate and calculated arrangement, and makes a simple and perfect disguise. I am sure that many people close to Dealey Plaza on that day, around 11 o'clock would if questioned, remember a man of my description walking with a very pronounced limp. I am not going to. Described the exact location I took up and from which I fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Well, isn't that convenient, and by the way, I haven't heard anybody from Dealey Plaza say they remember somebody with a pronounced limp. I will say it provided a minimum degree of security from the standpoint of interruption. However, I was banking on the excitement of the President's passing. He would only be seen for a few moments. Everybody would be concentrating on him. What I had to do would take only a few seconds, and I figured I stood little risk of being disturbed. I was able to free my weapon and fire it in less than 10 seconds, which means that my total exposure to discovery would be considerably less than 30 seconds. Half a minute is a reasonable risk. End quote. In Saul's telling there was an expectation that Oswald would be fired at by the service, and then when they didn't do it, it screwed up Saul's plan. He says this was the flaw that upset the Pop Pop plan. Had just one of the officers fired at Oswald, I would have killed him. He was so perfectly in my sights, it was, in its own way, a crime not to kill him. The Pop Pop would have been clean solved on the spot. I would have killed Oswald, and he would have tumbled from the window, though shush service would have been covered with glory, a medal for somebody. I don't know why they didn't fire. I seemed to have him in my crosshairs for an eternity. Then he disappeared from the window, I watched the entrance to the building from which Oswald fired the shots. I saw the poor bastard come out and turn to the left. He crossed the street at the intersection, and out of my view, that is the last I saw of him. I limped out of the building, and in two hours, I was out of the United States. End quote. Then Hugh MacDonald really track down this man named Saul? Was Saul really the man who murdered JFK? Was Saul the man that was referenced in one of the Warren Commission exhibits? Is he the quote, unidentified man who was photographed in Mexico City in October of 1963 before Kennedy was killed. Is all of this just one big hoax. When we go to Spartacus educational and we read the tab on Hugh McDonald, we find Hugh McDonald was born in 1913 he attended the Foxtrot Bravo India National Academy and eventually became second in command at the Military Intelligence School at Fort MacArthur. In 1949 McDonald joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He held several posts, and by 1963 was division chief Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. According to McDonald, he was frequently granted leave to be of service to several government agencies, which I'm going to stop right there. That, in and of itself, is weird, as the Gen Z kids say, that's us. Mean, you're talking about somebody that has involvement with various alphabet agencies, military intelligence, and is given a long leash. He's a division chief, yet he's frequently granted leave to be of service to several governmental agencies. That seems a bit odd to me. I'm thinking back to the Docu series the men who killed Kennedy and the portion that dealt with John Liget like how he was a mortician, but he could also disappear for days or even weeks on end, and the employer didn't care, and his co workers would be like, how come he gets to just up and go when he wants to? Well, you know, he's very talented. He can fix anything, he can camouflage anything. He's just that damn good. And everybody's like, Yeah, is there maybe more to the story? Anytime you hear about these people that they're given a long leash to just disappear and do government work, things that make you go, hmm. It was while he was on one of these jobs, head of security for Barry Goldwater, that he employed former ex Charlie India Alpha agent Herman Kimsey. Soon afterwards, Kinsey told McDonald the story about Saul, who we're told was actually Georgie visco. Kinsey claimed that John F Kennedy was killed on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev. The operation was planned by the KGB. Saul and Lee Harvey Oswald were both recruited to fire at Kennedy Oswald was told to miss on purpose, whereas Saul's job was to kill Kennedy. MacDonald claims he interviewed Saul who backed up this story. His book about the Pop Pop appointment in Dallas was published in 1975 after the publication of the book, MacDonald was contacted by Anatoly Cherenkov of the KGB. Cherenkov claims that Mikhail symbol KGB chief in Paris, had a meeting with Lyndon B Johnson and Helsinki Finland in the summer of 1963 at this meeting, LBJ was told that JFK and his brother Robert Kennedy, intended to have him prosecuted over the bobby Baker affair in order to save himself from being sent to prison. LBJ is told he will have to cover up the pop pop of Kennedy, according to Cherenkov in. Johnson agreed to these demands. An account of this meeting appeared in LBJ and the JFK conspiracy, 1978 the other book they referenced there. LBJ and the JFK conspiracy is another book that Hugh McDonald wrote. I don't have it yet. I haven't read it yet. I intend to, but there you go. Spoiler

 

alert,

 

we get, we get a lot of

 

bang for the buck here,

 

don't we, so we get the involvement of LBJ and the story about how he was going to be prosecuted over all that mess with Bobby Baker, and in order to save himself, he decides to go along with a cover up. But the actual mastermind behind it is Nikita Khrushchev, and the operation is planned by the KGB. And yes, Oswald is involved, and so is Saul, but Oswald is still going to be something of a patsy. Yeah. Wow. I mean, sometimes you don't even know exactly how to respond to something. It seems to me that these agencies will point the finger of blame at almost anyone. And when we think about McDonald's books coming out in the 1970s you're still talking about the Cold War. You're still talking about this narrative of us versus them, the US versus the Soviets, democracy and capitalism versus the Iron Curtain and communism. So I would imagine it would have still been acceptable to point a finger of blame at the Russians and the KGB. It didn't have anything to do with the company. It didn't have anything to do with the agency. This was all of those damn Rus Khrushchev died in 1971 so he wouldn't have been around to speak up for himself, to say, I had nothing to do with this, or I'm going to try to come after you. I'm going to try to prosecute you or sue you for defamation. So it's a little bit like, you know the various nasty sex stories that come out about JFK, they always seem to involve people that are not around to speak up for themselves. They're not around to say, I disavow. This never happened. This person is lying. It's just somebody coming forward with an accusation. It's almost like they're making it in a vacuum, because nobody can counter them. Nobody can say, prove that you were there. They'll just simply say, Well, why don't you prove that I wasn't to me, this is it's a similar thing with this whole McDonald narrative, as I said earlier. It makes for good spy fiction. I'm on this manhunt for this mysterious dude named Saul, and I'm having to go from continent to continent, and then he's telling his story about being in Haiti and meeting with some guy named Detroit who sets up the pop pop of the president. And Oswald is going to fire, but he's supposed to miss on purpose, and the Secret Service is supposed to take him out. And it's like, okay, as fiction goes, it's not bad. But do I believe it? Do I believe that this, this narrative that Hugh McDonald is putting forward? No, to be honest with you, I don't do I believe this guy, Saul, if he ever even really existed. I mean, who knows if Saul was the actual man in the pictures from the Warren Commission exhibit. I have no idea if he was or not. The whole damn thing could be a made up fiction for all we know. Nevertheless, if there was this man named Saul that sat down in London and poured his guts out to Hugh MacDonald in the 70s. Do I believe that Saul was telling the truth? No,

 

I don't.

 

I think that this is just another facet of the murder of JFK, and we see this satirized honestly in the movie and in the book winter kills by Richard Condon, even though I didn't care for winter kills and I felt like it was a low key character, besmirchment of JFK, oh, he was nothing but red hair and teeth. He was just a penis. He wasn't anything special, even though I think winter kills falls into that character pop, pop of Kennedy, that he wasn't anything special, he wasn't anything great. People die all the time, so who gives a shit? I do think that Richard Condon does an excellent job, like with the meme of all the Spider Man's pointing at each other, standing in a circle, pointing at each other. It was the mafia. No, it was the agency. No, it was Hollywood. No, it was a spurned lover. No, it was a diplomat. No, it was LBJ, no, it was somebody from Kennedy's own family. And you're just like, on and on and on it goes. The more obfuscations and crazy theories that we can get in the situation, the more difficult it is to come to the truth. Yes. And part of the point in winter kills is that Nick will just give up. Nick will go down so many rabbit holes. He'll get so many false leads. One person will blame somebody else, who will blame somebody else, who will blame somebody else, and he'll finally just say, Enough, enough. I need to let this go. I'm never going to get to an answer. I'm never going to get to some kind of objective truth. I'm never going to figure out what really happened to my brother. Nothing I can do will bring him back and change history anyway, so I may as well let it go. I feel like that's one of the points that books of this flavor have. For one thing, they're trying to absolve the agency of any responsibility by pointing the finger at really anybody else. But they're also designed to confuse you, to make you feel like, god damn it, this is such a crazy fucking story. I'm never gonna get anywhere. I'm never gonna figure out the truth. We're never gonna know and it's not gonna bring him back anyway, so I may as well give up. And then you stop looking for things that actually make sense. You just wash your hands of it and say, I gotta walk away. You know what? Life's too short. Rip sign of the cross. Hope you're doing well in heaven. Bye, bye. I mean, I feel like that's the point. You're just gonna give up, you're gonna walk away, and you're gonna get frustrated from trying to figure out what actually happened, and you'll just stop, stop searching for answers. You read a book like that, and you go, Well, that was a waste of a couple of nights. What even was that we can go there if we allow ourselves to go there. And what I mean by that is you can give up and get frustrated if that's what you choose to do. I still feel like getting close to the truth matters. I mean, that's like in Donald Gibson's book battling Wall Street, where he talks about, there's a problem of too many John F Kennedy's not everybody's opinion is valid. Some ideas hold more weight than others. We may not ever know a whole person, but we can get pretty damn close to roughing out a persona. We can look at that person's actions and begin to rough out a real character sketch of who that person actually was, even beyond trying to solve the murder of JFK. Yes, that's important. Please. Don't misunderstand me. It is important, especially I believe, as Jim Garrison believed that it was a coup d'etat on American soil that day. It's damned important at the same time, we don't need to give up on really trying to understand who Kennedy was as a person, what his intentions and his goals and his policies were for the country. Because I think when you go there, as Donald Gibson says, when you really start to look at that persona, you look at what his intentions were, his domestic policies, his tax reforms, his foreign policy, what he was trying to do to battle against colonialism and Neo colonialism, and really give these developing nations a chance at independence and stability. All of that is so incredibly important, and it's no surprise that he was murdered. It's a sad, awful thing, but it's certainly not a surprise. And I don't think that we will ever have another president that would try to be like him. I think anybody that's going to get into that office is going to be cherry picked by the military intelligence and military industrial complexes to be their buddy, to be their sock puppet. Same thing with corporate America. I mean, when you really look at the battles that JFK had with Wall Street and with big business, you start to understand, whoa, his enemy list was pretty damn long. So do I think that it was the KGB? Do I think that they hired Saul and Lee Harvey Oswald as manager, and Lee. Harvey Oswald was like a mandarin candidate, and then Saul was like an internationally renowned pop popper that got paid with a suitcase full of money in Haiti. No, I don't. I feel like those kinds of things are just leading you farther and farther off the beaten path into something that's going to slowly make you crazy if you let it Meanwhile, there are more important topics to cover, there are better books to read. There's better information to take a look at. Now that's just my opinion. It's just my review of the book, and I could be wrong. Maybe you read it and you think it's fantastic for me. Meh. It just seemed like agency propaganda. Stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode.

 

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