Episode 139: JFK - Destiny Betrayed, Part 4

In 2021, Oliver Stone released the docuseries JFK: Destiny Betrayed. In this episode, I will cover Episode 4 of this series.

➡️ Was Oswald a "witting" fake defector to the USSR? 

➡️ Why were the alerts on his file conveniently closed shortly before JFK's murder?

➡️ Why did LBJ reverse most of what Kennedy had done or had started?

Links:

Part 1: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14705477

Part 2: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/19405219

Part 3: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/19530241

My episode with Dr. Greg Poulgrain: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/15323199

My episode on Z: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14756079

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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Lee Oswald, CIA, Warren Commission, Cold War, Intelligence, Conspiracy, Vietnam War, Foreign policy, Civil rights, Covert operations, JFK, Declassified records, Political assassination, Geopolitics, National security

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 tonight. We will be wrapping up our little mini series walk through Oliver Stone's JFK Destiny Betrayed by covering episode four. If you have not already listened to parts one, two, and three, I'll make sure to put the links to those episodes in the write-up for this episode. Select your frosty beverage of choice, and we will saddle up and take this ride.

Simply Dag the Private Man in a Public and Dangerous Office is now available anywhere Amazon books are sold. Sara's first book, the multi-award-winning Decoding the Unicorn is also available on Amazon. Go beyond the headlines, look beyond the boring academic work, engage with something deeper, and buy your copies today. And now, back to the show.

Episode four opens with clips from the Church Committee. Committee member Richard Schweiker said of Lee Harvey Oswald that everywhere you looked with him; there were fingerprints of intelligence. This goes back to at least 1959 when Oswald defected to the USSR. Otto Otepka, with the State Department, noted the increase in Americans defecting to Russia at the time. He noted also that some came from the military. He suspected that some of these people were fake defectors assigned by the Charlie India Alpha to gather intelligence, he sent a letter to ask which defectors were real and which were agents. Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the names on Atepka's list. Atepka's request was forwarded to Angleton, as in James Jesus Angleton, who insisted that no further work be performed on Oswald's case, but Atepka continued to pursue this lead. We go now to author Lisa Pease. He was really interested in Lee Harvey Oswald before the pop pop, and he had a study of defectors in his safe. His office was not only bugged; people were planted in his office to spy on him, they put confidential documents in his burn bag and tried to blame it on him. He was painted to be a wacko. He was formally removed from the State Department on november 5, 1963, just 17 days before Kennedy's murder. Atepka is not in the Warren Report, and he was never called. James Angleton had access to all the Oswald files at the Charlie India Alpha and coordinated the agency's response to the Warren Commission's request. Now we go to John Newman. It could be opened after a few documents arrived at the Charlie India Alpha from other intelligence agencies, and that could be enough to trigger the opening of a 201 file. Sometimes they call it a personality file. Another thing that could trigger a 201 file would be an American citizen defecting to a communist country. Oswald met both criteria within nine days of his defection, but they did not open a 201 file on him for 13 or 14 months, immediately after the defection, Oswald's threat to commit espionage, which likely referred to the U-2 program, the threat that caused him to be put on the mail intercept program but not opening a 201 at the same time, this is very very unusual. It can only be explained if Oswald was part of a covert, sensitive, ongoing operation, which was the hunt for a mole. The history of the KGB and the Charlie India Alpha, their wars are not shooting each other so much as trying to penetrate each other, and we call them moles. It was ongoing and complicated. Angleton was looking for KGB moles inside the Charlie India Alpha, so 351164 was the file in the security office that was opened right after Oswald's defection, and that was shared only with Angleton's mole hunting office, but not with any other components of the Charlie India Alpha. The agency and the Foxtrot Bravo India knew what the KGB would figure out very quickly, and that was because of the assignment in Atsugi, Japan, where Oswald tracked the super secret U2s at the time. Once you've established the lure, the place where you trap the animal isn't in the Moscow embassy; it's back at Langley, where they thought the mole was. You want the KGB to contact their mole to ask questions, the moment the mole asks a question, it's over. He or she is exposed. The program did not work, Kell Sapries, and years later was put in front of probably our most celebrated and capable counterintelligence officer in the history of the Charlie India Alpha. His name was Pete Tennant Bagley. He began searching for the mole, and he was the key person leading it for years with Angleton. After he was retired, he attended a meeting of former agency officers down in the Carolinas, and a British researcher was there named Malcolm Blunt. They met and got along, and fortunately for history, Malcolm sat down with him and showed him all those documents that had come into the Charlie India Alpha on Oswald from the State Department and the Navy components at the embassy, and Pete looks at Malcolm and says, "Was he witting? And Malcolm didn't know how to respond. Pete raised his voice and insisted that he had to be witting.

That was a telling seminal moment in the history of KGB Charlie India Alpha Spy Wars in the history of Oswald. His early use by the agency was just a very important one, because finally, after all these years, a very senior agency officer had told Malcolm and us that Oswald was a witting false defector when he went to Moscow. So this is interesting information for a number of reasons. I mean, just prima facie on the the face of it, Oswald as a knowing, willing, and witting false defector, going on purpose with an agenda, not this idea of I have given up on democracy, I have given up on capitalism, and I want to go off to the Soviet Union because I think they do things better over there, but going with a deliberate agenda in mind, it also shows us the cloak and dagger maneuvers that happen even within an agency. We think about the story of Kennedy telling the French ambassador there are things going on in my own government and especially within the Charlie India Alpha that I don't know about, and I don't have any control over. But then think about this fiefdom that's happening even within the agency itself. This is terrifying information. It's it's very scary to really sit and think about. We're told that there was another unusual event that took place at the time of Oswald's defection, and that was that his source of income changed. Now we go to Douglas Horn. Oswald's last quarter of earnings in the United States before he defected should have been paid by the Marine Corps, but they weren't. We asked to see his Marine Corps earnings records. They did not pay him any money the last quarter that he was in the U.S. before his defection. No income from the Marines when he should have had some. Is it a coincidence, or was Otto Atepka correct in suspecting that Oswald was not a legitimate defector? And is this why Angleton told his secretary to withhold information from Atepka? We go now to Jefferson Morley. The line that the agency fed the Warren Commission was, we didn't really know anything about this guy. We now know that that was complete nonsense. Oswald was a figure of intense interest for four years before the pop pop. A dozen senior agency officers were very well acquainted with him and everything that he did, where he went, his family life, his politics. They were reading his mother's mail. Kennedy was killed. Oswald was arrested, and they say, "Oh, we know nothing about this man. In fact, the ARRB records show that Angleton and the Charlie India Alpha were receiving reports on Oswald until one week before JFK's murder. The Warren Commission pushed the idea that Oswald was a staunch communist, citing that he gave out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans and by his supposed defection to Russia in 1959. But records show that Oswald was working with fiercely anti-communist elements. Not surprisingly, many of these groups were known to and in some cases supported by the U.S. government. In the spring of 1963, Oswald moved from Dallas back to his hometown of New Orleans, where he began associating with men who had clear connections with these government efforts. David Ferrie had been with Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol in 1955 and was known as an extreme anti-communist. He was also a trainer and a pilot for the Charlie India Alpha in its secret war against Cuba, Oswald was involved with these Cuban exile training activities with Ferry. In 1963, Oswald was seen with Guy Banister in New Orleans. Banister was an extreme right winger who was close to the Foxtrot Bravo India, Charlie India Alpha, and the American Nazi Party. I've said before, you can't swing a dead cat in this system without hitting Nazis and fascists. Banister gave Oswald his own office at 544 Camp Street. Oswald now began to use his office to print and stamp pro-Castro literature, much of it associated with Fair Play for Cuba. Against their advice, he started a chapter of Fair Play in New Orleans, and he was the only member. I guess it only really needed one member to be the facade that it was. Now we go back to John Newman. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was created in April of 1960 at exactly the same time that Eisenhower ordered the creation of a.

To overthrow Castro, very interesting the coincidence of those two events. Oswald had another job working with Guy Banister to develop adverse information on political leftists, communists, or communist sympathizers. He did this at universities like Tulane. So all the stuff in New Orleans that he's doing, that includes fair play propaganda, are done to very publicly end up on TV and radio and in the streets of New Orleans, and to develop this profile to establish his bona fides as some kind of hot-headed Castro supporter. At some point, the foxtrot Bravo India probably after the pop pop decided they wanted to disconnect Oswald from themselves, and Banister would have to be disconnected as well. However, many handbills had 544 Camp Street on them. There was a message from New Orleans to the bureau written by Special Agent Maynor, who actually mentioned pamphlets that had the 544 Camp Street address on them. Before that message was sent, it was scratched out. After the pop pop, when the Foxtrot Bravo India questioned Banister, a former agent himself, they did not ask him about Oswald. One of the places Oswald leafleted in front of was Clay Shaw's international trademark. Shaw, who was arrested by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on charges that he was part of the conspiracy to kill JFK always denied that he was associated with the Charlie India Alpha. We see an interview clip of Shaw saying he was never associated in any way with the agency. The review board has shown these denials to be false. Shaw was both a highly valued contract agent and had covert security clearance for a project codenamed KQ Enchant. On screen, we see a copy of this document, and it clearly says, with regard to Clay Shaw and his association with the QK Enchant project, a review of Shaw's security file indicates that he received a five agency clearance on March 23, 1949. We also see that Clay Shaw was a highly paid Charlie India Alpha contract source. New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews had worked with Oswald in May of 1963 in an attempt to upgrade his military discharge from its undesirable status. After the pop pop, a man calling himself Clay Bertrand, phoned Dean Andrews and asked him to consider going to Dallas to defend Oswald. Under oath, Clay Shaw denied that he was Clay Bertrand. Andrews claimed that because of the medication he was on, he had only imagine it imagined the phone call. It was all just a medicated hallucination. But today, because of the work of the Pop Pop Records Review Board, or ARRB, we now have evidence and 12 people who confirm that Shaw used the name as an alias. Andrews later admitted that Shaw was Bertrand to author Harold Weisberg, but made him promise not to reveal it until after Andrews' death. On screen, we see an ARRB memo. I will add to the next formal request information on the destruction of Clay Shaw's 201 file. A while back, sometime last year, I examined all files currently in the JFK segregated collection related to Shaw. Some of Shaw's early reports to the Domestic Contacts Division still remained in the file. However, most everything else had been destroyed. I found nothing pertaining to the destruction of his files. Robert Tannenbaum, deputy chief counsel of the HSCA, and others have seen films of Oswald, David Ferry, and Charlie India Alpha, director of Cuban operations. David Atley Phillips at anti-Castro training camps. Phillips was a propaganda specialist, and his tactics to neutralize the Fair Play for Cuba Committee included infiltration, surveillance, and recruitment of other ancient provocateurs. Phillips also created an anti-Castro Cuban exile group. The Student Revolutionary Directorate, or DRE, was based in Miami and had a chapter in New Orleans led by Carlos Bringur. Records released by the ARRB show that the Charlie India Alpha was funding this group and helped plan activities, including the attack on a Cuban hotel that housed Soviet advisors. We go now to Jefferson Morley. Amspell was the Charlie India Alpha code name for the Cuban Student Directorate. The name does not appear in the final report of the Warren Commission. They certainly did not know that the group was receiving $51,000 per month from the agency in 1963, and they didn't know that the group was being run from Miami by George Joannitis, a psychological warfare officer who reported directly to Dick Helms.

The DRE published the first JFK conspiracy theory, saying that Oswald and Castro were the presumed pop poppers, and that publication was paid for by the Charlie India Alpha under the auspices. Of George Joanne's, the Joanidis story tells us that Dick Helms' handpicked man in Miami was controlling the group that had the most to do with Oswald before and after the pop-pop. I found out Joannetis' identity many years later, and I went to Robert Blakey, the head of the HSCA investigation, and asked if he ever knew Joe Anitas, and he said yes, they dealt with him a lot. He was the liaison. I asked if he knew what Joannetes was doing in 1963, and he said nothing. We had an agreement with the Charlie India Alpha that no one who was operational at the Pop Pop would be involved in the investigation, and I said think again. Joanneides was running those Cubans who were in touch with Oswald and who blamed Castro for the pop pop, then he came along and stonewalled you. The reason why they brought Joannetis in was to hide the connection to Oswald. Blakey was shocked because he saw how clever they had been. They went right to the heart of his investigation and paralyzed it. We go now to Dan Hardway, I no longer trust anything that the agency has told us in regards to the pop pop. It lied to the Warren Commission, it lied to the ARRB and the HSCA. In admitting that Joanidis was employed in a covert capacity as a liaison to the HSCA, it has admitted that it violated its charter and ran a domestic covert operation aimed at subverting the HSCA in its investigation. Back to Jefferson Morley, on the night of the pop pop, a spokesman for the DRE in Miami got on the phone and started telling reporters, "We know all about the guy who killed the president, and they talked to 10 or 15 reporters that night. So the Charlie India Alpha's assets shaped the story from the first hours after Kennedy was dead. Even the ARRB had trouble getting documents from government agencies. In late 1992, a month after the JFK Records Act was passed, the Shush Service began its compliance plan, but by January of 1995, it started destroying important documents. Indeed, John Tunheim. They destroyed a group of records which involve threats to President Kennedy in the fall of 1963. They have what are called threat sheets, and they were made, and there were many threats made on JFK's life during the entire year of 1963. They fought us on the release of those records. They even enlisted Vice President Al Gore's wife to help them because she had a legitimate concern about mental health records, and the idea was that this might disclose the names of people who had mental health problems. In the end, when we required agencies to disclose to swear under oath that they had located all pop pop records and had turned everything over to us. The shush service refused to sign the document under oath, and I think that was telling. Now Thomas Samaluc, the destruction of records is actually referenced in the ARRB final report. Very disappointing. There there were records related to trips that President Kennedy had taken in the fall of 1963 prior to Dallas, and on screen we see Congress passed the JFK Act of 1992. One month later, the Shish Service began its compliance efforts. However, in January 1995, the Shish Service destroyed presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy's trips in the fall of 1963. Now back to John Newman. In the Foxtrot Bravo, India, a stop or flash was placed on Oswald's files, which meant that no one could ask for a document in those files, or no one could even add a document to those files without going through the bureau's espionage division, and that lasted for four years. It was essentially a blinking red light on Oswald's files at the bureau. On October 819, 63, Marvin Giesling, a bureau agent, took that status off of Oswald's files. He dropped the flag. What that action did was to lower his threat profile at the bureau just weeks before the pop pop. That would mean that there was no reason to put Oswald's name on the security index.

One thing about the security index is when you have a presidential motorcade going through a particular route, anybody who is on that index has to be removed from where they are. They cannot be on the parade route. That action at the bureau didn't happen in isolation. The same thing happened at the Charlie India Alpha at exactly the same time, and of course it exposes the president to a dangerous situation that he shouldn't have been exposed to. And this is where I think Jim Garrison's point about did the mafia do all of this by themselves? Really, was it really all of these rogue elements? Was it really Castro? Was it really the Cubans? When you look at the coordination efforts that would have had to have happened inside the government, coordinated in time, in sync, really, I mean, doesn't it seem like a bit of a stretch to think? That the mob did that all alone, or Castro would have done that from outside the government. Really? There had been at least two prior plots to kill Kennedy in 1963: Chicago on November 2nd and Tampa on November 18th. JFK ends up not going to Chicago. Paul Blow, an informant on October 31st named Lee gave a warning to the bureau that four Cubans were headed to Chicago to murder JFK. Could this Lee have been Oswald? The following day, a landlady reported to the Chicago police that she had rented a room to four people that had boomsticks with telescopic sights and a sketch of the motorcade because that's not sketchy and creepy. The bureau passed that on to the service, who botched the surveillance of the four individuals. Two escaped, but the other two were detained. They were stonewalled by the snipers. They didn't get any information from them. While this was going on, there was another threat coming from another alternate patsy named Thomas Arthur Valley, who was making open and loud threats that he would pop pop JFK. They only picked him up when Kennedy canceled his trip on november 2 at 10 a.m1. day before the trip, the DM brothers had been killed, and that was the stated reason why he had canceled the trip to Chicago. What you found in Valley and the whole Chicago plot are so many similarities to what happens in Dallas; it cannot be considered coincidental. Valley was an ex-Marine. He had been posted like Oswald in the Far East at a station linked to the Charlie India Alpha because there were U-2 surveillance planes on it. It was easy to portray him as anti-Kennedy, disgruntled, a loner, armed. He had another intelligence link that he shared with Oswald, in that he trained Cuban exiles for combat, which was a Charlie India Alpha responsibility. Oswald was moved from New Orleans to Dallas in October to be there just at the right time for November. He's placed in a tall building where he gets a job. He's adjacent to the perfect kill zone. If we look at what happened to Valley. He's moved from Long Island to Chicago in August to be there before November. He too gets a job in a tall building adjacent to the motorcade with a perfect view of a kill zone. It too would have forced Kennedy's motorcade to do a sharp turn, slow down, and be at a point where there could be a perfect triangulation of crossfire. On November 18th, Kennedy was scheduled to do a 27-mile-long motorcade in Tampa, the Shush service was very nervous about the Floridian Hotel that the motorcade would have gone by. It would have forced a sharp turn. Nobody fired away at him, but in this case, the alternate Patsy would have been Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban exile. He attended a Fair Play for Cuba meeting on November 23rd, he went to Mexico City. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee loaned him money for travel, and he ends up being the lone passenger on an airplane to Cuba. The Charlie India Alpha found out about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the weird trip to Mexico City. The fact that he was a lone passenger on a plane to Cuba, and they didn't pass this information on to the Warren Commission. When the HSCA found this information that it wasn't pursued, they labeled it as egregious. If Kennedy had been murdered in Tampa, Lopez would have been the potential Patsy.

If they had to admit to a frontal shot because Oswald was behind, there were rumors that he had assisted Oswald with the murder in Dallas. Abraham Bolden was in Chicago when this plot went down. He was there when the service was briefed about the four snipers, and he witnessed how lax the security was for Chicago. He also witnessed, after the pop pop, the steps taken to keep the Chicago plot completely secret: no paper trail, compartmentalized. Agents ordered to keep silent about it. This information did not make its way to the Shush service agents that were protecting Kennedy for the future motorcade, including Dallas. Shush service agent Elmer Moore was aware of Bolden and aware of the Chicago plot. James Gockenauer, I met with Elmer three times face to face. We had several phone calls, very short, and one very long one. I asked him, "Did you interview Thomas Arthur Valley? And he said, "Oh, Washington wouldn't let me see the files on that. I said, "What about a shush service agent by the name of Abraham Bolden? His demeanor completely changed. He stood up from his chair, he pulled out his boomstick, and he put it on the table right in front of me. He leaned over the table and said, "Jim, tell me right now who are you working for? I said, "I'm an independent researcher. He told me in a very loud voice, with a very stern look, that goddamned lying N word. We finally got him. I said, "You got him? He said, "No, Kelly and the chief got him, meaning Thomas Kelly and James Rowley. I think that Moore and the rest of his crew were scared that Bolden knew something. We go now back to Paul. Abraham Bolden was one person who did try to say what he knew to the Warren Commission, but he was blocked from talking and railroaded into a phony crime and put in jail for a number of years. Now back to Gachanauer, Moore. Leaned back in his big, comfortable leather chair and said, "Who killed Jack Kennedy? Then he said, "Well, I'll tell you who didn't, with 100% certainty. It was not the Russians. And my head was starting to swim. He said, "I'll tell you why JFK was the Russians' boy. He was giving away everything he could for all intents and purposes. He was a traitor. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK started to use RFK as a foreign policy advisor. Bobby was influential in the decision to fire Allen Dulles, and then figured as an important advisor during the Berlin confrontation on Vietnam, both 1961 and 63, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We go now to RFK Jr. Jack had an intense interest in Cuban history and all the history of Latin America, and he believed that Castro had a point. In fact, he sent a message to Castro that he read and admired Castro's declaration at the Sierra Maestra about the liberation of Cuba and the right of the Cuban people to exercise sovereignty over their nation. The message he sent through Lisa Howard and William Atwood was a message that we don't care if you're communist, we don't care if you're Marxist. The only thing we care about is that you don't make your island a platform for Soviet aggression in the hemisphere, and stop your campaign against the Alliance for Progress nations, against the Social Democrats, against Betancourt in Venezuela and Camargo in Colombia, people who really were trying to democratize their country and develop fair systems for the poor. By '62, JFK was actively engaged with Khrushchev, and they had a secret exchange of 26 letters with each other. And they were operating through back channels because both of them found themselves in identical positions, surrounded by warhawks, surrounded by bellicose intelligence military establishments, and all of them viewing all-out thermonuclear war as not only inevitable but in some cases desirable, the first of those letters was smuggled by Khrushchev through a KGB spy named Georgy Bolshakov. Georgy was a friend of my parents.

My uncle wrote the first of his from Cape Cod, and he talked about how his children and their cousins were playing in the yard, and that these two leaders had no right to bring the world to a crisis that would destroy children like us who had no political involvement, and millions of other people around the world who would be destroyed. And it would be their failure, their sin, if they allowed that to happen. And they proceeded along a course that ended up with them really talking very seriously about complete demobilization, and Khrushchev's career was ended by that as well, which that is true. Whatever may have happened to RFK Jr. and why he's in the current establishment and all of that, what he's saying here gives us some really good information, and I certainly have looked at it from the perspective of a Hammerschold biographer, there really were people who had resigned themselves that thermonuclear war was inevitable, and it was in some cases to some of these war hawks desirable. What we see in Doctor Strangelove, for example, with Buck Turgidson, well, I mean, we're going to lose 10 or 20 million people, depending on the breaks, those really were conversations that were happening, and you had bloodthirsty people that wanted that to happen. They wanted to profit from it. They wanted to nuke the other guy into submission, into obliteration. They were totally fine with it. And part of what Dag wanted to do was say, "Not on my watch. You're not going to do that crap as long as I'm here and I have breath in my body. You're not going to pull that on my watch. And Khrushchev was in some respects foisted on his own petard because he muscled his way in. Bulganin was essentially forced out the door, and Khrushchev took his place. Then Khrushchev gets in the office, and he thinks that throwing all of his weight around and being so intense and coarse and vulgar is going to get everything that he wants. But it doesn't. I'm so very happy that he and JFK were able to work out a rapport with each other. I really wish that he and Dag had been able to, but that just was not in the cards. But it did end Khrushchev's career as well. We go now to Lisa Peace, Norman Cousins, who was then the editor of the Saturday Review, had landed a meeting with Khrushchev. Cousins goes to Kennedy and says, "Let's talk about anti-nuclear plans. Let's see if we can go for disarmament. What can I say as to your level of commitment? JFK says he's 100% committed to nuclear disarmament, and that was very difficult because there were so many hardliners on both sides. So they ended up with a limited test ban treaty where they banned all above ground testing. That's what came of that meeting. When Cousins returned, he said Khrushchev will need a real sign from you that you are truly committed to this. We go now to David Talbott, and of course this became very eloquently real in June of 1963 when JFK gives the famous peace speech at American University. Stone now turns to civil rights in the U.S. The Kennedy administration won administration one admission. Excuse me, the Kennedy administration won admission for. Black students to the last public colleges in the South. George Wallace made it clear that the fight was not over. That night, June 11, 1963, Kennedy addressed the nation. Many consider this the finest speech on civil rights since Abraham Lincoln. By the fall of 1963, Kennedy had made many enemies. He was working on an American withdrawal from Vietnam, an upcoming state visit to Indonesia in 1964, an independent unified democracy in the Congo, through Nasser through Nasser a balanced policy in the Middle East, normalization of relations with Cuba, and a détente with Russia, even offering them a joint mission to the Moon. But on november 22, another face of America asserted itself, and on that day the world changed. LBJ did not have the understanding of third world countries, which we we call them probably developing nations now, but back in the day, third world countries. Nor did he have the anti colonial sympathies of Kennedy. Numerous changes in foreign policy took place within a very short period of time after the pop pop. We go now to Richard Mahoney.

President Johnson did a 180 degree turn in terms of Congo policy. The U.S. under Kennedy was a champion of African nationalism, and the lead peacekeeper in the Congo becomes the agent of white reactionary nationalism and imperialism, led by the Belgians, the South Africans and, of all things, the anti-Castro Cubans. Yeah, so I am definitely going to butt in here as a Hammerschall biographer. That is one of the things that we see when we look at the secession of Katanga and all of the bloodshed that happens over there during that time. The mercenaries that flood the area are bad dudes. These are sketchy fucking characters, man. They're they're not choir boys. They're not altar boys. Okay, you're talking about people with ties to Mussolini's black shirts, Nazi expats and neo Nazis with sympathies towards Hitler, South Africans who support apartheid and racial segregation, fascists, along with just soldiers of fortune, murderers for hire-they don't kill who they, or they don't care who they kill, so long as you're paying them enough money to make it worth their while. The Charlie India Alpha now began to furnish planes and Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties to stamp out the rebellion. According to one pilot, the Charlie India Alpha manned the embassy and brought members of a secret operation from the Bay of Pigs, codenamed Operation 40, back now to Richard Mahoney, all of whom mount this operation to return a reactionary government to power under Joseph Mabutu and to bring Mois Chombi, who was the secessionist leader of Katanga, back in as prime minister. Jesus, and it was as if the U.S. had never really had a deep association with African nationalism under President Kennedy, right? So Moish Trombe was the one who led the secession of Katanga, most likely backed up by the West, by Belgian and British mining interests, more specifically, most likely Union Miniere. So like the idea, and and Mobutu had stage a coup to kind of get rid of Lumumba, and it's like so. The idea of bringing them back and backing them in any way is just so completely fucked up. Mobutu became the front man for imperial forces profiting in the billions from the riches of the Congo. The Congo never recovered from the pop pop of Lumumba, and today, despite its natural resources, it is considered a failed state where 80% of the population lives in abject poverty. So I want to butt in again and say we have to remember that the day after Dag was murdered, Harry Truman told the press Dagg was on the verge of getting something done when they killed him. Now there surely could have been more reasons besides the Congo, but there was a lot of wealth adjusted for inflation. It would be billions of dollars in today's economy. The powers that be were not just going to let that go. And then, if we also look at Dr. Greg Polgrain's research that Dag was planning to get involved in what was happening in New Guinea, there was a lot of money at stake there as well. If you missed the episode that he and I recorded together quite some time back, I believe it was from the summer of 2024. I'll drop a link to it in the write-up. Go check it out, because Dad was doing some amazing things. That's another reason why we're supposed to think that he was a weirdo. He was a pompous, icy, cold, cerebral intellectual who never let anybody close to him, or he was some arrogant messiah complex figure who thought that the UN was his church and he was the secular pope. There are reasons, in my opinion, why these spurious allegations keep getting thrown in our face, and sometimes they even come from so-called friendly sources, which makes me want to vomit, but there's a reason for that. It's not any different with Kennedy. We're supposed to believe that he was a vapid, idiotic womanizer that wasn't going to do anything good for anybody ever. Let him rest in peace. The end. You didn't lose anything special anyway. This is what happened. To men of peace, okay, if they really have a platform to affect change and they want to affect change away from the status quo, away from the shadowy web of power, pop pop, boom boom, you're gone.

And then, just like the 1969 movie Z, which I also recorded an episode about, if you missed that one, I'll drop a link to it. They have to set about knocking the halo from your head posthumously, they have to convince the public that you weren't anything special, you were a piece of crap, and it's totally fine that you're gone. But think about it: today, despite its natural resources, it is considered a failed state where 80% of the population lives in abject poverty. I guess it's a good thing they got rid of those men of peace, huh? Like Foster Dulles, Johnson now favored Saudi Arabia over Egypt and greatly favored Israel in the Middle East. The fair and even-handed Kennedy was the fair and even-handed mess Kennedy was building was lost in 1968 when Johnson learned that Israel had acquired atomic weapons. He made the decision to order Charlie India Alpha director Richard Helms not to tell the Pentagon or the State Department in 1973. While Egyptian tanks were crossing the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, Commander Moshe Dayan proposed the use of nuclear weapons. Kennedy's goals of peace through alliances with moderates and a solution for the Palestinian refugee problem were abandoned. I'm going to butt in there too because when Dag was still at the UN, he had developed an economic recovery plan for the Middle East because his thing was you can't convince somebody to take refugees that they don't want, and you can't convince somebody to try to carry another person on their back when they themselves are drowning. If there's not enough economic stability, if there aren't enough jobs, period, nobody's going to make it. Nobody has a chance. And so he really laid out a very sensible plan for growth and development in that region, and everybody fucking vetoed him. Which that right there should tell you what you need to know. There are just certain parts of this world that are placed under subjugation, and it's happening for a reason. You can always bet that there's money involved. In Latin America, JFK's Alliance for Progress, a program promoting economic development, suffered as well under Johnson. In 1964, Johnson said you could take all the gold in Fort Knox, and it would just go down the drain in Latin America unless the private investor could have some confidence that he could make his investment and it would not be confiscated. Johnson's private investment idea broke with Kennedy's policy, which was to make most of the loans out of the U.S. Treasury, thereby charging little or no interest. Under Johnson's leadership, the future allotments for 67 to 69 were reduced, and much of it was shifted to military programs. By 1973, it was eliminated. Under Secretary of State George Ball referred to the island archipelago of Indonesia as the true breaking point in Asia and more important to the U.S. than Vietnam. Back to Lisa Pease. Three days before Kennedy was killed, he signed an $11 million aid package that included not just military weapons, which Kennedy knew they would get from the Soviets, but Kennedy wanted to emphasize roads, infrastructure, education, money for food, money for levees, and creating rice paddies. Kennedy wanted to help Indonesia become self-sufficient. Bradley Simpson, President Johnson had a visceral dislike of Sukarno that led him to conclude that he didn't want to spend any political capital attempting to appear appeal to a leader that he viewed as a regional bully. So Sukarno bitterly criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam. He signaled that he was going to pursue a radical anti-colonial foreign policy that the Johnson administration saw as a direct threat to American interests and something that had to be stopped. The U.S. State Department signaled to the Indonesian army that overthrowing Sukarno and killing lots of communists would produce a political payoff. Lord. September 30th, 1965, following rumors of a suspected military coup against Sukarno, leftist officers tried to bring the disloyal generals to trial. Their plan quickly descended into chaos, and General Suharto took control. The Indonesian army, with Charlie India Alpha's support, blamed the killing of the generals on the Communist Party. Suharto then used this as a pretext to turn the army on the Communists and took Sukarno's place as president. We go now to Lisa Pease. 500,000 at least were killed.

People that were identified as communists, whether they were or not, if their name was on the list, they were killed. Back now to Bradley Simpson, and this is the most consequential legacy of President Kennedy's pop pop: the coming to power of a president who not only didn't care about Indonesia, but who surrounded himself with officials who had a stake in a far more confrontational approach, which a far more confrontational approach towards Indonesia, that ultimately resulted in a spasm of mass killing in which nearly half a million unarmed civilians were killed by the Indonesian army. Regarding Vietnam, a review of the declassified record shows that Kennedy continuously pushed back against the Pentagon by refusing every request to commit combat troops there. This conflict is reflected in NSAM 273, drafted in the days before his death. In its final form, it allowed for direct involvement in Vietnam. John Newman, McGeorge Bundy, who's the National Security Advisor, puts together a memo based on the truth about the war that it's going terribly, and he does it in a way to try to make sure that Kennedy would be able to go along with it. So the way he writes the first draft of two seven threes to say we need to intensify the war effort against the communists, but the way we're going to do it is to increase South Vietnamese forces. There's not a word about American forces or Americanizing the war. In fact, after much maneuvering, Kennedy, Bundy, and McNamara had already settled on a plan to withdraw 1,000 troops by 1963, with the goal of having South Vietnam responsible for its own combat operations. While Kennedy's body is still in the casket in the rotunda, Johnson changes 273 to a new version. It's Sunday, and McGeorge Bundy has to take the old version around town and show it to Rusk and all the principals to get their input. And when it comes to the key paragraph, paragraph seven, which talks about how we're going to intensify the war, all of a sudden, the restrictions that Bundy had put on that instead of changing a few words, there's two big hash marks through the paragraph, and it's completely rewritten. And I asked Bundy in an interview, "Who told you to do that? He said Johnson did. In the review board's declassifications, there's evidence that Johnson was fully aware of Kennedy's Vietnam withdrawal plans, disagreed with them, and worked on McNamara to make him renounce them. And we hear now the the phone call that LBJ said about I always thought it was foolish. You and the president were talking about a withdrawal, but I always thought that was foolish. We go now to James Galbraith. McNamara came to the decision to withdraw U.S. forces, and in my view, he implemented it faithfully until Kennedy was killed. These changes allowed the U.S. to unilaterally engage in combat in Vietnam rather than simply supporting and advising South Vietnamese troops, which led to serious consequences. Back to John Newman. Within days, we're talking about sending out the DeSoto missions, these naval excursions along the coastline of North Vietnam that ends up with thematics and the so-called Tonkin Gulf attacks, and the resolution in Congress opening the door to intervention in Vietnam. We see a newsreel of McNamara in retaliation for this unprovoked attack on the high seas. Our forces have struck the bases used by the North Vietnamese patrol craft. Now back to John Newman. But the new news there is that it wasn't Johnson who first figured out the day after Kennedy was shot that he needed to change this in Sam. He just rubber stamped what Taylor had been doing covertly ever since Insam 263, as declassified memos have revealed, by autumn of 1964, during his campaign against Barry Goldwater, Johnson had already decided that he was going to escalate the Vietnam War. In fact, the directive that would become the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been written before the incident itself. I'm going to pause, and I'm going to say that again because we don't want to gloss over this. In fact, the directive that would become the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been written before the incident itself. Remember, Jim Mars claimed to have found a memo that Johnson was already reversing Kennedy's Vietnam policies before Kennedy was dead. This is incendiary information, if true. Johnson claims the U.S.

won't send American soldiers to do what Vietnamese soldiers should be doing for themselves. On august 7, three months before the election, Johnson had already planned for an extensive air war. It was to begin after his inauguration. After JFK's death, Robert Kennedy knew that relations with the Soviet Union hung in the balance. We go now to RFK Jr. On November 29, my father had a meeting with Bill Walton, a friend of the family, and who had a cultural trip to the Soviet Union, he asked Walton to convey a message through Georgy Bolshakov to Khrushchev, saying that our family knew that the Soviets were not involved in the pop-pop, that it was a right-wing plot from our own country. David Talbott, in other words, the Charlie India Alpha or forces aligned with the Charlie India Alpha, they said they also believed that Bobby Kennedy intended to run for office and that eventually he would get back to the White House. And when he did, he planned to resume his brother's policies of détente and peace with the Soviet Union. But they had to bide their time and wait for that opportunity. This is a stunning message to deliver to Bolshakov. Because of course he will take it right to the Kremlin. When Khrushchev paid his respects to President Kennedy at the American Embassy, he was reportedly holding back tears. Castro got the news of Kennedy's death while he was discussing détente with Jean Daniel. He exclaimed, "This is bad news. Everything now is going to change. Like Bobby Kennedy, neither man believed the conclusions of the Warren Report. Lisa Pease. When news came of Kennedy's death all over the world, people were mourning and crying and going to embassies in Latin America. People lit candles in the Yucatan Peninsula. Peasants cleared an area and planted a peace garden. Philip Mullenbeck. Nassar learned of JFK's death in the middle of the night. He got up, dressed, and went down to his office, he realized there was nothing he could do. According to his son, Nassar went into a great state of depression after Kennedy's death. Relations with Egypt gradually deteriorated, and they increasingly shifted their alliance towards the Soviet Union. Robert Rakoff, a mass was held in the leading Catholic church in Cairo, which had a capacity of 600, but they somehow fit 4000 people into that church, Algeria, which had a special feeling for Kennedy, declared a state of mourning for a week. Flags were flown at half mast. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt said that he thought the Egyptians had seen in Kennedy the best of what they saw in Americans. That Kennedy had represented a kind of ideal of America to ordinary Egyptians. R.F.K. Jr. They polled historians, they polled the American people to say who are the most popular presidents. One metric that you can use to objectively at least judge their foreign policy is how many boulevards are named after that president in foreign countries, how many hospitals, colleges, schools, and statues, and in that sense, JFK beats every other president hands down, that feeling is not only held abroad. Many people at home felt it after Kennedy's death. A period of depression and cynicism overtook the country, and that America was somehow changed forever. Our overwhelming disbelief in the Warren Commission's findings contributed to increased skepticism in all our foundational beliefs about the government. David Talbott, I think there's a direct thread between the events of 1963 and the kind of horror show that America is having to endure right now. And I think once you kill a president in broad daylight on the streets of an American city, and everyone knows that powerful forces did it, and it can never be solved, that sends a signal not only to the American people but to the American media, to future American leaders. If America really wants a democratic society, then we should get to the bottom of this traumatic crime that continues to reverberate throughout American history. The ARRB made many startling discoveries in the four years of its existence. In October of 2017, in compliance with the JFK Records Act 25-year deadline, the Orange Man said. Unless he was in receipt of further information, he would not block declassification of the last of the files. Six months later, he postponed releasing the last batch, which the review board had previously delayed from 1998. This means that 56 years later, the U.S.

government is still maintaining secrets about the JFK case. Can a democracy survive if it does not know its deepest secrets about the darkest days of its past? We go now to RFK Jr. one last time. He is asked by Oliver Stone if he thinks there is a connection between his father and his uncle's deaths. I don't think anybody has connected all the dots. There are dots there. My father's death has never been investigated properly, and then we end with a clip from JFK's peace speech about not a Pax Americana but a a true peace. So look, as I've said before, on many different outlets, not just here, but across various media appearances that I've done, if I go out in my little small town, town square with a sandwich board sign that says, "I pray for peace. We don't want war. We just want peace. Okay, fine. Nobody cares. But when you're talking about somebody who is really in a position of power, they have the ability to affect change, and they want to affect change. They're tired of perma wars and boom bust cycles and central bankers and all this horse shit. If they really take a stand and say not on my watch and they mean it, bye bye. They don't tend to last very long. They either get caught up in some kind of blackmail, or as Whitney Webb has said, you don't even have to have blackmail anymore. You can just do AI and deepfakes. You can dig up some kind of embarrassing information from somewhere and ruin that person. And if you don't have it, you just make it up. You just fake it. You just deep fake it. It is really a travesty, but the onus is on us. Those of us in the younger generations and the future generations, everybody listening to this broadcast at some point is not going to be here anymore. While we're here, it's up to us, and then later it's up to our children and grandchildren and so on, to keep carrying a torch to make sure that people of peace are not slandered and misremembered. Because if we're not careful, that's exactly what will happen. Remember what Malcolm X said: If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Oliver Stone's series JFK Destiny Betrayed. If you have not checked it out? Please do so. It is absolutely worth your time. In the meantime, take good care of yourself. Stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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