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Episode 71: The JFK Files: What We Know So Far

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!


SUMMARY KEYWORDS

JFK files, congressional hearings, Oliver Stone, Abraham Bolden, Charlie India Alpha, George Joannides, Bay of Pigs, Dag Hammarskjold, systemic racism, Secret Service, anti-Castro operations, covert action, FOIA, research community.


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 want to talk about the JFK files. What do we know so far? And this is not by any means meant to serve as some comprehensive, all encompassing index. Truthfully, I'm digging into this topic for my own education, for my own research, as much as anything else. I don't claim to be an expert, and I don't claim that I'm going to be able to digest every single happening. Full disclosure, I'm recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 27 so that I can release it tomorrow night, around 7pm Central Time. There could be news that breaks in between, and I'm like, Oh, damn it. I wasn't able to scoop that these things can move very slowly until they move very fast. So I again, I make no claims that this is going to be an exhaustive everything you might ever possibly need to know about the JFK files. I'm going to tell you, I don't think any one person, any one podcaster, any one researcher, can have any valid claim for that if, like me, you're really just looking for a map like at the zoo or in the old school shopping mall, when you would go up to a directory and it would say you are here, if that's what you're looking for. This is the episode for you. Stay tuned.

 

So what's new with you?

Work sucks. My boss acts more like a tyrant than a manager, and my coworkers are just caught in the mix.

Oh, I know more than half of them don't seem to know what they're doing. They just toss buzzwords around. It's a joke.

I feel like those 90s infomercials. There's got to be a better way. 

There is a better way. Every manager should be required to read Sara Causey's book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld, it's an amazing book about an even more amazing man. 

I usually don't read biographies I've tried in the past, but they're often so academic and boring. 

Nope, not a dry biography. You should check it out on Amazon. I think you'll like it. 

I will. Thanks for the suggestion.

Decoding the Unicorn by Sara Causey, available on Amazon.

 

There have been a couple of congressional hearings. I linked to both of them on the conspiracy theories Facebook page. So shameless plug. If you are not following me there, please do, because I try to keep up with these events and make sure that you have links to be able to find them on YouTube. The first one involved Oliver Stone, James di Eugenio and Jefferson Morley. I think there may have been a couple of other people there. I'm kind of trying to go off of memory, but representative Luna is really, I think, spearheading that effort. The other hearing, Abraham Bolden was there, along with several other individuals that I did recognize from the research community. Douglas horne, I think, was there. There was some lady by the last name of Coe I think that represented more of the mainstream. I'm using air quotes here, mainstream historical opinion. That's all I'll say about that. I will also drop links to the YouTube videos if you have not seen those. If you missed those, they weren't on your radar, you can go back and check them out now, and I would recommend that you do unfortunately, whenever I was listening, Abraham Bolden was at that second hearing, or he was like, available via zoom. There was some kind of problem with the microphone, and I don't know that it fully got resolved. I had difficulty hearing. And he was the main reason that I think a lot of people were tuning in that wanted to hear what he had to say. And it was like, Oh, I wasn't able to hear very well. But I think that you can get a synopsis of what he said if you go back and check out that YouTube video, or even if you just Google it to get some of get some information. So we have these two congressional hearings. Not to be honest with you that I think congressional hearings are going to ever do a hell of a lot, but I guess in the realm of shrugging your shoulders and saying, Well, it's something, something's better than nothing, right? I mean, I guess we could say that. Has there been no pun intended here. But as we say, as authors, particularly the smoking gun, not that I'm aware of, no, I'm not aware of there being any one document, any one thing that has just catapulted the whole narrative out of the water. So we do know that there was Charlie India Alpha surveillance of Oswald, but anybody in the research community already knew that. We didn't. We didn't need a document dump to tell us that the agency was already aware of Oswald. They already knew about his visits to the Soviet Union, to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, prior to the pop pop this is already known within the research community. Now, if you go to Al Jazeera, they have an article titled New JFK pop, pop files. What was revealed about Oswald and the Charlie India Alpha plots within that. Here we go again. You know, kind of the mainstream narrative. I'll quote from the article now, but Tuesday's document dump did not support the validity of any conclusion other than the commission's findings. According to experts who spoke to Al Jazeera, I didn't really see anything to change the narrative, indicating that Oswald, as the lone pop Popper, was the person who killed John F Kennedy, and that it was not the result of a conspiracy, says Mark Silverstone, professor and presidential presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller center of public affairs, told Al Jazeera, the documents that I saw Were in some ways tangential to the Pop Pop itself. Silverstone added, all right, so there's that we have also learned about internal concerns within the Charlie India alpha. So for example, a memo from Arthur Schlesinger Jr that discusses some potential agency reorganization, following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and highlighting some concerns about what was really going on within the agency, and how it might be counter to what was going on within the government, what was going on within the State Department. In other words, if we want to get away from the flowery language, we can just simply say they were going rogue. They botched the Bay of Pigs invasion, and they were going rogue, and there was some concern about how to rein them in. But again, if you're already in the research community, that's not going to be anything surprising to you. On CBS News, we find the article JFK files related to the Pop Pop released by Trump administration, and that's where you can find a little bit more information. They do quote Jefferson Morley to their credit. So they're giving a voice to somebody other than, well, I'm a professor, and I'm going to tell you what to think, because I'm an academic. There are also obviously allegations of Charlie India Alpha involvement. Former Army Intelligence Officer Gary Underhill claimed that a faction within the agency was responsible, and maybe they were motivated by the fear that what they were doing would come to light like it was all about to be exposed by JFK. And of course, you know, some people will say, from from the old guard, from the mainstream. They'll say, Well, that can't possibly be true. That's just sensationalism. Of course, again, those of us within the community are like you sure about that. You can find that article on news.com.au, Charlie India alpha, responsible bombshell claim and JFK files the subtitle reads, 1000s of papers relating to President Kennedy's death have been released with startling claims by an intelligence agent who died months later. So there's that. Then we also have, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, Abraham boldens testimony. He was, in case you're new to all of this research, he was the first African American agent that was appointed to the Secret Service, which I normally call the shush service. I'm not going to bleep that out, the first person of color appointed to the service by JFK. And he testified about the thwarted Pop Pop plan that had been plotted in Chicago. And then he also has been very clear about systemic racism and systemic problems, not even things directly related to racism, but just general problems within the shush service, and how there were, according to Bolden, agents, who said things like, I'm not going to get involved if somebody tries to get him, I'm not, I'm not going to do my job and get in the way. And then they would say racially charged things about Abraham. They would say racially charged things about JFK and take this attitude of, if somebody comes after him, then they'll just do it. We will stand aside, and he's fair game. You can find an article on the New York Post again, and I'll drop links to all of these things so you can find an article on the New York Post. First black member. Of service finally testifies to JFK committee. Details, Chicago pop, pop plot. Definitely believe that all of these documents, all of these news articles, are worth your time. Now I want to segue just a little bit, because it seems like what I'm seeing is a real emphasis on George Joan 80s. He seems to have become a major topic now within the research community, because there are some kind of documents or some kind of file about George Joannides that is still being withheld. I want to pull the curtain back a little bit, but I I can't do it too far. I'm gonna have to really be careful, because, you know, I'm an independent author. I'm an independent, private individual without deep pockets, and I don't want to get my behind in a sling, so I'm going to be careful how I say this. But you know, there, there was some information that I wanted to get from a particular entity as it related to Dag Hammarskjold. Because, as I'm sure most of you are aware by now, I am a biographer of Dag Hammarskjold and I care very deeply about his life and his legacy. Even though we talk a lot about JFK here, make no mistake about it, I have a lot of tender feelings for Dag. I was able to get from from one entity, I was able to get some information that I needed, and it was relatively not a hassle. There is another entity, however, that has been totally unhelpful to me and has very much acted like you are an ant, you are a drop in the ocean. You are a nobody. We don't have to deal with you. We don't care if you are looking for things for the historical record. We don't care if you are doing something journalistically. We don't care if you're an author. We basically do not give a flying fuck about you, lady, go away. We're not going to help you. We're not going to give you the documentation that you're asking for. And it's like, what is wrong with you people? I feel like that scene in Horrible Bosses too, when Jason Sudeikis' character is like, Whatever happened to decency? Chasing your tail with some of these various entities will make you a little bit crazy, especially if you know you're dealing with something that doesn't fall under FOIA. You're trying to get information and you can't FOIA somebody's ass. You're having to just try to to get it through other means, it can be infuriating, and ultimately, if somebody just decides that you are the gum on the bottom of their boot, and they're not going to deal with you except to flick you off, it is what it is. And I made note in one of the hearings that even these representatives, even these members of Congress were talking about trying to get documents from a particular entity, and they, too were being stonewalled. And again, you just sit back and you're like, where is the decency? Like, how do these people get away with the things that they're doing? And then how do they sleep at night after doing that series that I've recently completed and published on this broadcast about Operation Gladio and how completely mindblowingly horrific that program was. And who knows there's, I'm sure there's still relics of it that are still in place. You wonder even more, how do these people sleep at night? Like, how do you stand who you are as a person to do those things. So evidently, we are still waiting on information as it pertains to this figure, George Joannides. Now if you listen to the podcast that Rob Reiner did, Hang on. Let me google it really quick, because time passes. It's like, post time has passed. And it's like, I you know, you won't even remember stuff. Like, what year was that? Was that 22 was that 23 was that 24 I don't even freaking know. Hang on, just a second. We'll we'll pull it up on Spotify. So Rob Reiner and I listened to the whole series. It's just like I say, time goes by. You get busy with other things. Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien had put together a podcast called who killed JFK, and it looks like it came out in like q4 of 2023 if you listen to that show, then you may remember that they also homed in on this guy, George Joannides. well, now he's back. He's he's back in the spotlight, so to speak. In the research community, if you are not familiar with this cat, I'm going to go over to Spartacus educational again. I'll drop a link to all of these. Please check out the source material for yourself. So. And we find George joanides, the son of a journalist, was born in Athens, Greece. His family arrived in New York in 1923 we can skip the bio. He joined the Charlie India alpha in 1951 and later became chief of the psychological warfare branch of the agency's JM wave station in Miami. In this role, he worked closely with the DRE a militant right wing, anti communist, anti Castro, anti Kennedy group. This was a group that Lee Harvey Oswald was in contact with in New Orleans in August 1963 journalist Jefferson Morley says he knows of no evidence that Joe enedes was in contact with Oswald during this period. Now, of course, we don't know the last time that this page was updated, and if maybe some of this information will change once we get the files, I just want to insert that for a moment. I'll continue to read now, when John F Kennedy was pop popped in Dallas, Richard Helms appointed John M Whitten to undertake the agency's in house investigation. After talking to Winston Scott, the Charlie India Alpha station chief in Mexico City, Whitten discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald had been photographed at the Cuban consulate in early October 1963 nor had Scott told Whitten his boss that Oswald had also visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico. In fact, Whitten had not been informed of the existence of Oswald, even though there was a 201 pre Pop Pop file on him that had been maintained by the counter intelligence special investigative group. John M Winton and his staff of 30 officers were sent a large amount of information from the Foxtrot Bravo India. According to Gerald D McKnight, the foxtrot, Bravo India deluged his branch with 1000s of reports containing bits and fragments of witness testimony that required laborious and time consuming name checks. Whitten later described most of this material as weirdo stuff as a result of this initial investigation, Whitten told Richard Helms that he believed that Oswald had acted alone in the pop pop of JFK. On December 6, Nicholas Katzenbach invited Whitten and birch O'Neill Angleton, meaning James J angletons, trusted deputy and senior special investigative group officer to read commission document one the report that the Foxtrot Bravo India had written on Oswald quit. Now realized that the Foxtrot Bravo India had been withholding important information on Oswald from him. He also discovered that Richard Helms had not been providing him all of the agency's available files on Oswald. This included Oswald's political activities in the months preceding the pop pop, and the relationship Joe and Edie's had with the D, R, E. So we have this shadowy figure of Joan 80s that's, I think, in some ways, in the same category as James Jesus Angleton, where it's like we probably only know a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what there really is to to know about this guy and what he was actually up to on May 23 Jefferson Morley, via JFK facts on sub stacks, YouTube channel released an interview that he had with Jerry Thornton of Barstool Sports about the JFK hearing that was held on May 20. And the title of it, of course, I'll drop a link. Please check it out. Please watch it for yourself. The title of it is, what is the Joe and Edie's file Jeff Morley on Barstool Sports, so to give just a quick and dirty summary, again, because that's all I'm doing. We're just putting the pin in the map. Of you are here getting a sense of what in the hell is going on. Thus far, there was a hidden role of Joe and Edie's. So Joe and Edie's, as a reminder, was this chief of covert action at the agency's Miami station in 63 and that was, I think, the largest agency station in the world because of the anti Castro operations. So we have Joe and Edie supervising and funding this group, the Cuban student directorate, which in Spanish was the DRE and it's this group of anti Castro Cubans. The group has direct confrontations, which you probably remember, direct confrontations with Oswald in New Orleans. And this involves like that staged street fight or whatever, like Oswald is posing as being pro Castro, and he gets into a fist fight, and I think even the cops said like it didn't seem genuine. It didn't seem like these people actually wanted a rumble. It seemed like they wanted to be public and they wanted to get caught. So these encounters do just that it they generate propaganda and they allow for some news coverage. That paints Oswald as a Castro sympathizer after JFK murder, the same agency funded group tells the press that they knew Oswald and that they knew of him and called him out as a pro Castro radical. So this creates national level publicity that links JFK is murder to Fidel Castro in one single stroke, the public narrative of this cuckoo nut ball, pro Castro, closet commie pop popper who murdered Kennedy is at least partially seated, although I'm sure we can say fully seated, by a covert Charlie India Alpha propaganda campaign. Now, did this have public or congressional awareness? I'm sure it didn't, right, we're talking about covert crap. There's also congressional deception during the 1970s Congress reopens the investigation into Kennedy's murder via the House Select Committee on pop, Pops, or the HSCA, the Charlie India alpha, brought Joe and edies out of retirement to act as their liaison with HSCA investigators. So we very, very, very, very much have an instance there of the fox guarding the hen house. If we were writing satire, you know, especially this hits me even more now as an author, as a published author, like if we were writing satire, if we were trying to do something along the lines of winter kills by Richard Condon, except make it not so unflattering and hateful towards Jack, we could. We couldn't make this up. The Editor, your your freaking developmental editor, would be like, nobody's gonna believe this. You're getting a little bit too goofy. You need to rein it in. And yet, as they say, truth really is stranger than fiction. So joanides deliberately withholds the information that he himself had managed this Cuban student group during their interactions with Oswald back in 63 so we have a conflict of interest, obvi, and then we also have an obstruction of the investigation, but this information is not discovered for decades as of the recording that Morley did with Barstool Sports, which was only just on the 23rd the personnel file from the Charlie India alpha on Joan 80s, which may contain details on the covert methods, the cover identities and the operations from 63 is still classified, and that's one of the big linchpins of why Joan 80s has become front and center in this focus. So Jefferson Morley really emphasizes that is this something that is explosive? Is it damaging because it's still being held back? Is there something that is still so bad, something that is still so damning in this guy's file that we're not allowed to see it. If they release the file, and that turns out to be the case, will that profoundly affect how the public feels or how the public perceives the agency, particularly as it relates to the murder of JFK, whether or not it proves a direct plot, whether or not it draws a direct line that anybody and their brother could see and say, Oh God, this, this is the smoking gun at last. Will it damage public perception? Is that? Well, alright, again, I want to think about how I how I phrase this, there's another tactic that you can use, being being an author. It's really weird sometimes how the twists and turns that our life takes, they wind up being germane to us in so many other ways, besides something that's obvious and literal, whether you are writing a stage play, a screenplay or even just a good old fashioned novel, there is this device called the MacGuffin, and it's famous in particular with Alfred Hitchcock, because it's a little bit like a filmmaker or An author will dangle a shiny object in front of you. They'll have a particular character or a particular part of the plot, and they'll tell you, like, Ooh, this is the thing to focus on, but the real story, the real meat and potatoes, is actually developing and congealing in the background, and then by the time you get to the end of the. Film or the end of that novel or television series, you realize that the MacGuffin that was set up for you in the beginning is much less juicy and much less relevant than the other stuff that's been marinating in the background. So here's here's my thought. Is it possible that this personnel file on Joe and Edie's does have something that is explosive, damaging, damning, crazy in nature? Yeah, that's possible. It's also possible that it's kind of a paper tiger or a MacGuffin. While we're all focused on this personnel file on Joe and Edie's, it may very well be that there's something else congealing in the background that's much, much more interesting and much more damning. I don't know until you can look at the evidence, until you can see it for yourself and draw your own conclusion. It's impossible to know whether it's the paper tiger or if it's something that's actually serious, that's going to make a big difference within the research community and make a big difference in how people perceive what was going on with the agency and the Kennedy administration and then the murder of JFK, generally speaking. If you want the road map, according to me, of where we are in the shopping mall or the zoo, we're pretty much there. That's that's what we know. I have not heard of anything that has come to light so far that has made me just stop in my tracks and say, Oh, my God, I never knew this. It's possible that those revelations are coming. And it's also possible that whatever is in this Joan 80s file, when, and if we're allowed to see it, will be that through line, that important moment, where we all suddenly say, oh my god, this is it. This is the proof everybody's finally been looking for. Or then again, it could be a McGuffin. And I think you have to be careful of over expecting anytime that you're dealing with the government, anytime that you're dealing with these agencies, if you're thinking that they're going to be in a big ass hurry to implicate themselves, you're playing yourself. I'm a Gen Xer, you know, I remember reading this quote. It was written by somebody in the silent generation, which comes in between the greatest generation and the baby boomers. And this guy was talking about how he was about 30, like he was in his late 20s when JFK was murdered, and then he was in his early 30s when Martin Luther King, Jr and Bobby Kennedy were murdered. And he said that was the end of it for me, like I I knew that we were never going to make change. There wasn't any real hope. It was just lip service. And when I read that quote, I thought, my God, that could have been written by an exer because we're we're in a similar boat. We're sandwiched in between the boomers and the millennials. So it's like the greatest generation and the boomers get a lot more attention than the silent generation, the boomers and the millennials get a lot more attention than Gen X. Sometimes, when people are writing articles about how the different generations manage various things, we're left out all together. It's like this whole group of people born between 65 and 80 suddenly don't exist. And generally speaking, I'm fine with that. You know, we could be a sort of second Silent Generation, I guess. But that's it. You know, it's like, there's not there, this hope and change, this progress, that we're really gonna turn it around. I sit back, and I'm like, sure you are sure, Jan, okay, yeah, that's cynical, and it sounds terrible to the youngbloods listening. Oh no, no, there's there's gonna be some smoking gun. There's gonna finally be some file that blows everything out of the water. You just wait and see. Maybe I doubt it. I'm highly skeptical that that that day is coming, but maybe, I think the more likely scenario is that as time goes on and you have more researchers painstakingly going through those files, it will be one of those Wait a minute, hold the phone, moments like David Lifton and best evidence like he's coming through all of this information, and he just finds, like, one note about surgery performed on the cranium, and it's like, wait a minute, who did that and when and why was that done? It's very much a collection of moments like that that lead us further down the road of what actually happened. And it's not lost on me that the 29th is JFK birthday, and I really don't want to make the entire focus about, well, this guy got murdered. He got his brains blown out in broad daylight, and it was a national trauma. It's important. To remember that he was also a human being. He was also a person with an entire life, and his life was interesting. I see this so much with with DAG, because so few people still yet even know who dag was, and the story always becomes about his murder, because the details are sensational and bizarre. So people get stuck on the murder and they watch something like cold case hammer should, and then they don't go any farther. And it's like, Jesus Christ. People don't like, please make that extra step, because Dag's life was remarkable. It really was. And JFK, his life is very interesting, too. So I would just encourage everybody, all right, here's where we are with the JFK files. Generally speaking, please don't forget to pick up a biography, or to consider who he was as a person and not just reduce him down to a crime victim. We need justice, we need closure, we need clarity. All of those things are still true, but it's like two things can be true at once. We can need closure. We can need perpetrators to be brought to justice if they're even still alive at this point. And we can also remember that he was a human being and that it's important to not reduce him down to his sex life, or what happened one afternoon in November and say that's the sum total of everything, because it isn't, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

 

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