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Welcome to the first episode of Conspiracy Theories Book Club. I'm Julian Borough. I decided to kick this series off with a JFK-focused episode because it is without question my favorite conspiracy, and I use that term loosely, because there are plenty of verifiable facts to show that we haven't been told the entire truth about what happened on that fateful day in Dallas. So what is Conspiracy Theories Book Club?
For the next three weeks, you'll hear from the producers behind conspiracy theories as we interview expert authors and researchers. In this episode, you'll hear me interview Jefferson Morley, author, investigative journalist, and co-founder of JFK Facts, a substack to which I actively subscribe.
You'll hear about ongoing disclosure efforts around key documents kept under wraps by the CIA and FBI, the CIA operative found to have been reading Lee Harvey Oswald's mail years before the assassination took place, and the lasting implications of JFK's murder. If you enjoy this episode and want to recommend experts for us to speak with or topics you'd like to learn more about, don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] or theconspiracypod on Instagram.
This episode was recorded in early November 2023 and has been edited for length and clarity. We'll get into the episode right after the break. Stick around.
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Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. I would like for our audience who may not know your work, if you could introduce yourself briefly. My name is Jefferson Morley. I'm a journalist, investigative reporter. I'm the co-founder and editor of the JFK Facts blog, which was created in 2012 and is now found on Substack. I'm the author of four books of nonfiction,
three of them about the CIA, and I live in Washington, D.C.,
So you started the blog in 2012. I was wondering what interested you so much about the JFK assassination in particular, and why have you committed so much time to this event? So Rex Bradford is the creator of the Mary Farrell Foundation website, which is the largest online collection of JFK records.
and is a good friend and has created an indispensable, the indispensable source for anybody interested in the Kennedy assassination or frankly, the Kennedy presidency.
So he and I were talking and we were looking ahead to the 50th anniversary in 2013. And we just said there's so much bad journalism in major news organizations about the Kennedy assassination that we need to have a presence there because we know that there's
False statements, erroneous statements, misleading statements, a whole ridiculous discourse about conspiracy theories that doesn't interest us because we're researchers and historians. And so we just wanted to have a presence in the continuing discussion of conspiracy.
JFK's assassination. For me, it's a great story. I pay attention to it because it's very important in American history. It's of continuing interest to lots and lots of readers. And there's key questions and issues that are unresolved and
you know, the ripe subject for good investigative reporting. So to me, it's a very natural story to gravitate to. I like its scale. It's important. And we know that it's important. President Biden issued an order about it earlier this year. Robert Kennedy Jr. is running for president and talking about it.
President Trump has been talking about JFK files. So, you know, it's a big deal in American culture. It always has been. So to me, it's a very appropriate subject for an investigative reporter. I wonder if you could expand upon Biden's order, because I feel like our listeners may not be as cognizant of the more recent updates around disclosure. Yeah. So just to back up a little bit.
to understand the context of what biden did last june um you need to understand the story of the jfk records act and people a lot of people don't know this which is why i want to go into some detail about it congress passed the jfk records act in 1992 amid the controversy about oliver stone's movie
And what Congress said was, we're not going to reinvestigate the assassination, but we are going to make all of the government's records on the subject available to the public.
in the controversy over Stone's movie and people pointed fingers and said, "Oh, Oliver Stone, you're a bad boy. How dare you question our government and our sacred Warren Commission?" To which Stone replied with telling effect, "If you have nothing to hide, why are all of the records of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations still secret?" So Congress responded to public opinion and wrote a strong law.
And the law created an independent board, which went to all of the government agencies and said, please identify any records related to Kennedy's assassination. And here's our criteria for that. Please give them to us. And please tell us if there's any reason why any portion of this document can't be released. The agencies were allowed to request postponement, not forever, but postponement of sensitive material, private information, documents.
secret government procedures, all that sort of thing. But the law said after 25 years, all of those withholdings should be ended. And after 25 years, except in the rarest of cases, that was the language of Congress, except in the rarest of cases, all JFK records should be public in 25 years. Okay. So...
So the question came to President Trump in October 2017, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo and FBI Director Chris Wray went to Trump, met with him, and said, there's thousands of documents that we couldn't possibly release. So Trump wrote an order about JFK files, and he sent out a tweet saying all the JFK files have been released ahead of time.
And that was false in two respects. All of the JFK files weren't released, and the ones that were released were released way behind time. But Trump's order gave the executive branch agencies four more years of secrecy, which is what they wanted. That pushed the question of JFK files to October 2021.
where it landed in the lap of President Biden. So the FBI and the CIA went to Biden and says, there's thousands of documents we couldn't possibly release. And so Biden gave them pass. What he did was he issued a statement and said, the agencies have not been able to comply with the law because of COVID.
So when the Washington Post called me up and asked me what I made of this, I said, this is the COVID dog ate my homework. This is absurd. They've had 29 years to prepare for this. COVID wasn't a big obstacle for 28 of those years. So it's just an excuse for more and continued secrecy. That is.
for a year. And then in December of 2022, Biden issued another order asking federal agencies to take one last pass at declassifying everything they could, and then he would be done with it. So in 2023, federal agencies released several thousand more records in their entirety, removing the redactions that had existed, leaving about 3,500, 1,000,
documents related to the assassination that still contain some form of redactions. Might be a word, might be a sentence, might be a whole paragraph, might be a whole page. But there are 3,500 assassination-related records that still have redactions in them. And in June, President Biden issued what he called his final order,
on JFK files. And what he said is from now on, the release of these records will be handled by the agencies themselves. And so there is a transparency plan written by the CIA, which now governs the release
or non-release of those remaining JFK assassination files. So what Biden did in June was he effectively negated the JFK Records Act, which was a strong law precisely because it had taken the final decision about declassification out of the hands of the CIA and the FBI and invested it in an independent authority
which would consider the public interest in full disclosure, not only the agency's interest in continuing secrecy. So Biden gutted the JFK Records Act and the CIA is now in control of the release or non-release of those 3,468 remaining assassination related records. So right now, those documents are secret indefinitely.
Understanding that Alan Dulles sat on the Warren Commission and that has serious implications for the validity of their findings with regards to the original investigation to the JFK assassination, what are the implications to the CIA controlling disclosure at this time? Well, that's a very good question. I mean, Alan Dulles' presence on the commission
a man who had been fired by President Kennedy and who had considerable hostility towards his policies, that was a blatant conflict of interest. And it showed that the commission had been compromised or corrupted right from the start by a CIA official. So then over the years, if we look at the pattern, you know, the CIA has issued false statements everywhere.
regularly and consistently about the assassination ever since 1963. So 60 years later, when Congress has passed a law saying everything's got to be made public and the decision has to be taken out of the hands of executive branch agencies and the public interest in full disclosure has to be respected and honored, for the CIA to now control the process,
is, again, a conflict of interest and a corruption of the process. And it's certainly, you know, it's certainly not in compliance with what Congress wanted. And let me point out one thing about the JFK Records Act. We live in a time of polarization, bitter polarization. And yet,
The JFK Records Act passed both houses of Congress unanimously. 535 elected representatives approved of this bill. No one, no one dissented on the record, including Senator Joe Biden.
So this is what the people want. They want a full disclosure. And the CIA has stepped in and prevailed on both President Trump and President Biden to give them what they want. What they want is continued indefinite secrecy around JFK assassination records. Now,
It is no surprise that given that set of facts, people are going to have suspicions about the CIA. And that's not the fault of conspiracy theorists.
That's the fault of the CIA itself. Yeah, I'll say that on this show, we have covered a number of CIA operations that have achieved disclosure. And the nefarious nature of these agencies is not a conspiratorial belief. It is a real belief. It's a historical fact.
I'll tell you, in my eyes, the JFK assassination is meaningful because it seems like he was a president who was genuinely committed to peace in terms of actually talking to other countries and global entities as opposed to immediately defaulting to politics.
some kind of military intervention. Yeah, no, that's a very good point. And, you know,
I mean, Kennedy was a politician. He was running for reelection. He said different things at different times. He presented himself as a fierce cold warrior sometimes and was very eloquent in defending the free world and that stuff. But if you look at Kennedy's record in 1963, his policies were a very bold challenge to the conventional wisdom of
of the national security agencies in the United States in several ways. He pushed a test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a measure that his generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously and vehemently privately opposed. Kennedy used his prestige as a peacemaker
which he gained during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to prevail upon the generals and to get the Senate to approve that. And when they did approve it in September 1963, Kennedy said that was his proudest moment as president. So Kennedy was moving the country, the ship of state, in a new direction. Not radically, slowly, but definitely. And the enemies of his policies were
in Cuba, in Vietnam, for example, were very, very unhappy with him in 1963. So,
That's the political setting in which Kennedy is assassinated, in which there are real schisms in his administration about the wisdom of his policy. And there is a pervasive feeling among the enemies of his policies that Kennedy is not only weak, but he's actually a danger to U.S. national security. That was a very common feeling.
in the upper echelons of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963. You stepped on my question a little bit because I was going to say that for our listeners who were not around for the political realities of the early 60s, I
I was going to ask, what is the difference between our current political system in which we have been somewhat conditioned to accept through extreme polarization that no progress can be made with any respect and the system that Kennedy was overseeing? Well, so if we compare our situation today with that time, you know, we live in a multipolar world now, right?
Russia is a superpower. China is a superpower. So in 1962, there were really only two superpowers, Soviet Union and the United States. And they were locked in the stance called the Cold War, which doesn't really evoke the full danger of the situation. What you had was two nuclear armed superpowers who really did not talk to each other or negotiate with each other.
were armed to the teeth with extensive, massive nuclear arsenals, which were on a hair-trigger setting. A missile could get from the Soviet Union to the United States in 15 minutes. So if there was a nuclear attack launched, the U.S. government would have to decide in 15 minutes whether to respond.
And likewise for the Soviet Union. So the world lived in a state of anxiety, suppressed anxiety that we really don't feel today. And those feelings came to the fore in what's called the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, in which the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida.
And President Kennedy demanded that those missiles be removed. The Soviet Union refused. They said, you have missiles on our border, 20 miles from our border. How can you be offended by our missiles 90 miles from your border? And Kennedy said, if those missiles aren't removed, I'm going to attack. We're going to destroy them ourselves.
Kennedy was under huge pressure from his generals, who said right from the start, just go in and destroy those missiles. Kennedy pursued a peaceful solution and rejected the unanimous recommendation of his generals. And for two weeks, the world lived in a very real fear that there was about to be a nuclear war in which
10 million people might be killed in a matter of days. And President Kennedy was the president who was going to have to push the button and make that happen. And Kennedy thought, this is crazy. I don't want to go to war over Cuba. I don't, it's not an important country. I don't want to destroy the world. And so,
Kennedy got the Soviet Union to back down and they withdrew the missiles. And Kennedy enjoyed a tremendous boon in his popularity. Peace was popular. And so after that, Kennedy had a new vision of the world. He never wanted to be put in that position again. He saw how dangerous the Cold War was, how it might create a war really over nothing that was very important. You
Cuba was not important. Not many people, not important to the US economy, not a threat strategically. It was not important. And yet, Kennedy had almost been forced to nuclear holocaust. So that was why he pushed the test ban treaty. That was why he didn't pursue the overthrow of Castro. That was why he put out private feelers. Would Castro be interested in a diplomatic settlement of the country's
differences. That was why Kennedy was holding back in Vietnam. And in October 1963, he signs on to a symbolic 1,000-man withdrawal of U.S. troops. So while Kennedy's military and intelligence apparatus favored a very aggressive military approach, overthrow Castro, don't make deals with the Soviet Union, escalate in Vietnam,
Kennedy didn't want to do that. And in June of 1963, he makes a very important speech to the graduating class at American University in 1963. And he says, we do not want a Pax Americana imposed by U.S. weapons.
It's a very striking statement for a US president to make and not one that any president before him had ever made. He was saying, you know, we don't want to be the world's policemen. We want to live in peace, even with systems that are very different than ours.
like the people who live under the Soviet system. And he said, you know, those people who live under the Soviet system, they are mortal, just like us. And so Kennedy made this very eloquent appeal to wind down the Cold War by citing the common humanity of people. And this is why
people still honor his name. And this is why he is the most popular president when people go back and Ronald Reagan runs a distant second. It was because Kennedy had an articulated a strategy for peace. Now, you know, with his death, that strategy for peace was not pursued. Lyndon Johnson did what JFK didn't do. He escalated in Vietnam.
He didn't pursue more negotiations with the Soviet Union. And so Kennedy's dream was not realized, but he articulated it and people remembered it. And over the years, we have seen since the mid 1960s, you know, the United States has been at war pretty much constantly ever since that 10 years in Vietnam,
extensive engagement in Central America in the 80s, although not with U.S. troops, but with U.S. advisors. And then after 9-11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and now we have a war in Ukraine. So, you know, Kennedy was trying to demilitarize U.S. policy
And he didn't succeed. But that dream of a strategy of peace, that's why Kennedy is still popular. And that's why he's still relevant. Thank you for such an incredibly thoughtful answer to that question. I think that our listeners will sit with that because it will seem so incredibly foreign to them.
to imagine a world in which we don't attempt to be that world police. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and people should, should Google JFK American university speech and listen to it and, and see, I think they will be struck by a tone of,
that they haven't heard from any other U.S. president in terms of looking at the common good of humanity and how a president should pursue that. It's very important, and it's why Kennedy is still relevant. I was hoping to back up a little bit to the documents that have been disclosed. I was hoping that you could introduce our audience to Ruben Efron.
Yeah. So in the past year, under President Biden's direction, executive branch agencies declassified some of the JFK documents that had redactions. And so for the first time, we saw some documents in their entirety. And one of the documents that was released in April of 2023 was
identified for the first time the name of the man who had read Lee Harvey Oswald's mail. Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of President Kennedy. And it turned out that the CIA had been reading his mail from 1960 to 1962.
And Ruben Efron was the man at the CIA who did that. Now, we had seen portions of Ruben Efron's memo before, but what Ruben Efron wrote a memo in 1962 to a colleague in the CIA, and he had recalled a letter that he had intercepted. So this is male surveillance. So what the CIA was doing was they were intercepting
the letters of people who had been targeted by the agency. They would get the letter, they would steam it open, they would copy it, they would read it, and they would file it, and then they would put the letter back in the envelope, reseal it, and send it on its way. So they're stealing the content of Oswald's mail. Now, people may wonder, well, why were they reading the mail of the guy who supposedly shot the president?
Well, Oswald was a Marine who had moved to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism. He lived there for a couple of years, married a Russian woman and come home. And so Oswald,
the CIA was very interested in him and they were reading his mail during this period. But the important part about the story of Ruben Efron is not only did we not know that the CIA was reading his mail, not only did we not know that it was Ruben Efron in particular, a CIA operations officer who was doing it, but also
Ruben Efron wrote his memo to his colleague after Oswald had returned to the United States. So the CIA was interested in Oswald even when he was back in the United States, which is a violation of the agency's charter, which says the agency, except in very limited circumstances,
cannot target U.S. citizens or conduct operations on U.S. soil. So the CIA, in the case of Oswald, violated that prohibition against that, and they kept track of Oswald while he was on U.S. soil after 1962. So the importance of the Ruben Efron story, which only came out when I published it and the New York Times published it this past July, was
the CIA had the accused assassin under surveillance and under surveillance in 1963 and indeed right up until the week before Kennedy leaves for Dallas. So we understand much better now how close the surveillance of Oswald was. You know, in this letter that Ruben Efron intercepted, it's not like
oh, look, he's betraying secrets or, oh, look, he could be a secret agent for us. It's nothing like that. They're interested in the details of his personal life.
There was nothing exceptional in the letter. There was no sensitive security content in that letter. They want to know they wanted to know about Oswald's state of mind. And so the story is important is, well, first of all, the CIA lied about that. They didn't disclose this to assassination investigators. But why were they interested in his state of mind? What was going on? Did they not realize he was a threat to the president?
And so we still don't have very good answers to those questions. But the Ruben Efron story shows us that he was watched very closely by people at the top of the CIA in 1963, in the weeks before Kennedy was killed. It's been notable to me to hear you frame Oswald as the accused assassin. What is, for any of our listeners who have listened to
episodes on the JFK assassination up to this point. I think what's notable is not so much the accusation that the CIA was directly implicit in the murder so much as the volume of actors who were interested in
Kennedy's death and kind of the absence of measures around his safety. Would that be an accurate statement? Obviously, there's a breakdown of security in Dealey Plaza. What's striking about the JFK story is no one was held accountable for that. OK, so Oswald was accused of the crime.
But he has the presumption of innocence. He was never brought into court, so his guilt was never established by a court of law. It was established by a politically appointed commission, which specifically declined to appoint a counsel to defend Oswald's interests.
Mark Lane was a New York lawyer. He came to the Warren Commission and said, "Look, Oswald's dead, but he deserves counsel to defend his interests in this." And the Warren Commission said no. And so the Warren Commission never gave Oswald the presumption of innocence. He was presumed guilty and they never really investigated any other alternative. And so not only was no one ever brought to justice for the crime, but this, and I think this is equally significant,
No one lost their job. The head of the Secret Service was not fired after this atrocious failure in Dealey Plaza. The head of the FBI, which had been watching Oswald since his return, was not fired. The head of the CIA and the people who had been maintaining the Oswald file at the CIA, none of them were held accountable. No one even knew who they were.
Nobody in the Dallas Police Department lost their job. So in the eyes of the government, nobody did anything wrong that day, despite the fact that the president was killed in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people.
You know, that's very suspicious. Why would that be? How come nobody lost their job? Did everybody do their job? This was just, you know, a thing that happened. That's not plausible. And that's what sticks in people's minds is the whole the whole story that they've been told, you know, it defies credulity on its face. And then when you drill down on the facts, you see that the case is not very well supported.
Some facts are not facts. Some facts are lies, you know, things that the CIA told the Warren Commission, like we didn't know anything about this guy. That's what CIA officials said under oath to the Warren Commission. It was, and I say it without fear of contradiction, a bald-faced lie. They knew a lot about Oswald, and they knew it right before Kennedy went to Dallas. They knew his politics, his personal life, his foreign contacts. They were reading his mail.
To say we only had minimal information about him, that was a cover story to cover the CIA's deep interest in the man who supposedly killed Kennedy. Just short of 10 years after Kennedy's assassination, the United States undergoes the Watergate scandal, which significantly contributes to the erosion of our trust in our institutions. And now I would...
go as far as to say that people don't expect disclosure from the government. And even if there were disclosure, we would not trust it anyway. Is this not the exact perfect atmosphere for a government to be operating because there is no expectation of truth at this point? Yeah. I mean, this is what's so discouraging about it is
Given the lack of accountability in 1963, the false statements given to the Warren Commission, to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to the press,
You know, people have no confidence at all in the government and no confidence even that there's any process to regain that confidence. So, I mean, I've always looked at the JFK story as an opportunity to establish accountability and to get at a story that
is embarrassing to the government or, you know, whatever, but that the people would get the full story. Now, we still don't have the full story. And, you know, and when people say, oh, yeah, we know one guy, a little man killed a big man, get over it. You know, I mean, most people don't believe that. They never have believed that. And it's not because of conspiracy theorists. It's because of the circumstances of the crime.
You know, when, when right after the president was killed within a week, pollsters went into the field, nationally reputable pollsters. And they asked people all sorts of questions. Where were you when this happened? What did you think? How did you feel? And then who do you think was responsible? And one of the questions in the polls was, do you think more than one person was responsible? Okay. This is November last week of November, 1963. At that point,
The White House, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Dallas Police, the New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, every national news organization and institution said, that dead guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, did it on his own and there's no politics involved here. That same week when people were polled,
66% of people nationally said they believe more than one person was involved. In Dallas, I think the figure was 62%. Anyway, a solid majority thought that more than one person was involved. At that point, there were no JFK conspiracy theorists. Oliver Stone was a senior in high school. Okay. His movie was 30 years in the future.
There were no conspiracy theorists. So it is not credible to say that conspiracy theorists created this belief that there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's death. It's simply factually false. We can see very clearly from the results of those polls done in November 1963 that it was the circumstances of the crime that
that convinced people that more than one person was involved. It was not conspiracy theorists. And that figure has pretty much held ever since. 50 to 60% of people over the years
fluctuates, but 50 to 60% of the people believe that the president was killed by his enemies. And about 35 to 40% believe the official story. So that disbelief is founded in fact. It was not created by conspiracy theorists. I'll tell you why I'm very interested in disclosure. In 1961, Eisenhower warns of the military-industrial complex.
Yes. Kennedy is the very next president. He appears to be interested in peace, and you've already spoken very eloquently on him butting heads with generals and established CIA leadership at the time. And now, in 2023, we live at a point where this country is in desperate need of aid. Right.
A lot of people are suffering in this country. And what I would like to, I guess, in my wildest dreams see is disclosure around the fact that
It appears as if clandestine agencies may have played a part in the murder of this president and that maybe they are not deserving of the percentage of our tax dollars that are currently allocated to them. Yeah, and you make a very important point there. You know, people ask me, why does the CIA care? You know, whoever was responsible, let's say people were responsible, they're surely responsible
are not alive anymore, why can't they just come clean? And the point is, is that, yes, it's a very important symbolic issue. And people will say, well, if your people were involved in this, in complicit or let it happen, that's not a historical issue for the CIA today. That means a CIA official might get called up to Congress and say, explain this to us, Mr. Director.
How did this happen? And Congress might say, well, we're going to cut your budget because you've not been straight with us all these years. We're going to reorganize you. We're going to, you know, there are real world consequences for full JFK disclosure, which is why the CIA is fighting it so fiercely. And,
I mean, we are now six years past the deadline set by Congress and the CIA is still fighting. We do not want to disclose. We do not want to disclose. And for good reasons. They have a lot to lose. A lot of money to lose there. I live in Los Angeles. There are 75,000 unhoused people in this city alone.
There is no lack of money in this country. It just seems like we aren't allocating it to the right measures and interests. Well, I mean, we are skewed towards, you know,
These military intelligence agencies, they get the budget they want, you know, and everybody else comes is in line after them, you know. And this is why the accountability around JFK is important as a symbolic issue and also as a real issue today is, you know, we've been at war.
you know, pretty constantly since 1963. Kennedy offered an alternative. We don't know exactly what he would have done. And he might have changed course. He might not have been a peacemaker. Of course, there's no way to tell. But he offered the possibility and he defined a choice, another path that was available. And, you know, that path is still available to us
But the entrenched power of these agencies is such that that option is not really on the table. And look at it. I mean, look at what the CIA did. They rolled Trump and they rolled Biden, two very different presidents with very different attitudes towards the CIA. And the CIA got exactly what it wanted from them. That's how strong they are in the constellation of American power. They get what they want.
There is a common theory within the broader scope of JFK assassination circles that if he was not assassinated, there may not have been the cultural revolution associated with the late 60s. Do you ever think about that sliding doors moment in American history? You know, I think that that broader cultural change, the counterculture, the emergence of a counterculture in the 1960s,
That had many causes, the affluence after the post-war baby boom, the emergence of a civil rights movement where African-Americans are demanding full citizenship for the first time, and
you know, technological changes like the birth control pill, which changes the reality, social reality for women everywhere. You know, there were broad causes behind the cultural change that happened in the 1960s. But I think with Kennedy, what was lost was not so much that cultural change would have happened. And in fact,
We can see Kennedy as kind of a leading edge of that, that he's anticipating that there's going to be this movement against militarism in favor of civil rights. And as a politician, he's trying to get in front of that parade so that he can, you know, muster it towards his own ends. So I think that, you know, we would have had a counterculture and all that, but we
You know, if Kennedy had wound down in Vietnam and extracted the U.S. from Vietnam in the way that Charles de Gaulle extracted France from Algeria, and that was a big, you know, geopolitical issue at the time. Algeria had been France's colony for, you know, decades, a century.
And it was very unpopular for for de Gaulle to say, no, we're going to let Algeria go be an independent country and we're not going to we're not going to mess with them. Kennedy was was anti-colonial in his thinking. And this is something else that's underestimated about him, but very clear. He really sympathized with these new countries that emerged after World War Two in Africa and Asia that had been under colonial rule for centuries.
and became independent after the war. And Kennedy said, yes, these countries have the right to self-determination. These colonial powers have no right to go in there and dominate these people. And so Kennedy was acting on that anti-colonial impulse. And if Kennedy hadn't gone into Vietnam, we would have had the cultural change, I think, but you wouldn't have had that bitter division
that the Vietnam War engendered. And, you know, we live in a polarized time today, but the late 1960s is the only time comparable to today where you had that kind of bitter polarization and a feeling all around, like, is the country going to survive? Can we hang together? You know, and it turned out we did, you know, barely, but
If Kennedy hadn't been killed or if Kennedy had pulled out of Vietnam or even if there had been a real reckoning of who caused his death, that division around Vietnam would
wouldn't have happened. And so, yes, we would be we would live in a very different country. So to answer your question, we would have had a cultural change regardless. That was coming for many reasons. But we we probably wouldn't have the loss of faith and the bitter divisions that we had as in the 1960s and that are, you know, that we still live with today.
You and your team at JFK Facts are committed to disclosure. Do you ever spend any time thinking about what actually happened? Do you spend time thinking about the magic bullet?
where did the gunfire happen? And, you know, why did Oswald do this? And, you know, why did Ruby kill Oswald? That sort of thing? Yes. Like, yeah. You know, we really focus on completing the record. You know, people are going to have strong feelings about this. And, you know, we're not out to convince anybody. Our position is let's get all the records out and then we can sort it out. We debate among ourselves, you know,
you know, was the CIA behind manipulating Oswald? Was it maybe a Pentagon operation? Was it just some little faction within the government that nobody knew about? Did somebody at the top give the nod? You know, all of those types of questions. We talk about that among ourselves and, you know, and frankly, we disagree. It's like, nah, I don't think that's right. Yeah, I think, you know, to me though, that sort of conversation is,
You know, I'm a working journalist and an author. So I look at, you know, those are interesting conversations. Buy me another beer and I'll give you another theory. But in terms of what I'm going to write and say actually happened, you know, I don't spend a lot of time with that because I want to focus on what I can say absolutely for sure happened.
And in this very complicated story of like, what, why, why, you know, you're not going to be able to establish every fact. And, you know, people say, well, did Oswald kill officer Tippett? And I'm like, you know, I think so, but you know, I'm not, I don't stake anything on that. You know, I'm not an expert in that. It, my beliefs in the JFK story don't hang on that factual question.
So I say, you know, I don't know. You know, and so people say, well, you know, Jeff, what's your theory? You know, I don't know who killed Kennedy. Some people do, but I don't. And just to wrap up here, I'd like to thank you so much for joining us. I would like to give you some space to tell us about the team behind the JFK Facts sub stack and then plug any upcoming episodes
work that you have or anything that you'd like for our audience? Yeah. So who is this guy, really? So I'm a journalist. I've been in Washington since working for national publications since 1983. So for 40 years, covering a wide variety of topics, CIA and national security primarily, but many other issues, especially racial issues, and
And JFK Facts is the venue where I place my reporting on the JFK story today. What's new? That's what we're about, JFK Facts. What are the new facts? What are the old facts? What are the bad facts? You know, so people want to know more about this approach. I think they should check out the JFK Facts sub stack. We've got a team of writers, you know,
So Chad Nagel is a writer who I met recently through the American Conservative, actually. I'm not a conservative, but I like Chad's writing about the JFK story. Very factual, very well-informed historically. So he's a staff writer. And then we have another staff writer, Peter Voskamp, and he covers presidential politics. So he covers RFK Jr., he covers Trump, he covers Biden. Wherever the JFK story is,
intrudes into our presidential politics, we have a writer who's there. He's not advocating for RFK, nor is he criticizing him. He's trying to report who is this guy? What's he saying? What does that mean?
Then we've got a managing editor, a guy named Steve Byrne, who's a veteran journalist of the Detroit Free Press. And he's kind of our hardcore newspaper guy, copy editor, fact checker. I let him, he's kind of the traffic cop in terms of when do we publish. And so he's an essential part of the team. And then we've
The head of our research is Margo Williams. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning researcher for The Washington Post and The New York Times, two Pulitzer Prizes. And so she's our research and fact checking person. So, you know, we're serious journalists.
So that's kind of where we're coming from. In larger perspective, if people want to know my work, it's really important to know my books, which are not JFK assassination books. My three books about the CIA are biographies of men who were at the top of the CIA in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Three men. My first book, Our Man in Mexico, is about Winston Scott, who was the chief of the CIA station in Mexico.
and who was in charge of the surveillance of Oswald when Oswald visits Mexico City shortly before the assassination. My second book, The Ghost, is about James Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence in the CIA from 1954 to 1974. And he was the man who controlled the Oswald file at the CIA.
And then my third CIA book is Scorpion's Dance about the relationship between Richard Nixon, the 35th president, and Richard Helms, the eighth director of the CIA. And that book tells the story of how the Kennedy assassination resonates after 1963, right up through Nixon's presidency and into the Watergate scandal. So
These books really give the context for understanding how the CIA itself understood what happened in Dallas. OK, when I got into this, I thought there's a million conspiracy theories out there. And you know what, Jeff? No one cares what your theory is. But I thought, what did Wynne Scott think about November 22nd? What did Jim Angleton think? What did Richard Helms think? And what did they do?
that's really interesting. And that's far more interesting than any theory I could concoct. And so that's what my books are about. And so they really give people the bigger historical context to not focus on the assassination, because then you start going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and you miss the picture. You miss the political reality. And so the books really give that. They really give the context in which
the CIA was part of and implicated in and observing the JFK assassination story. And then in larger perspective, I'm trying to
you know, tell people and especially young people, I know this seems very distant and, you know, who cares? And is it a meme? And what are they saying on TikTok and all those things? And, you know, it's, it is important. It, it, it takes a while for this story to get through the static of, of,
When you get down to the hardcore facts, it's a really important story. And if you understand it, you understand how it has shaped our world today. And that's really what I hope people come away from my work with is this thing that happened a long time ago, it tells us something about the world we live in today. And, you know, make up your own mind about what it tells us. I'm not demanding that you agree with me. Plenty of people disagree with me. That's fine.
But the subject, this particular incident in American history, it's really important and it's really relevant to today. I could not agree more. Is there any particular misconception that kind of sticks in your craw that you'd like to iron out for our audience right now? You know, there is this –
I think meme is the right word. There is this meme that if you doubt the story that one man killed President Kennedy for no reason, if you doubt that, you're a conspiracy theorist. That is a very propagandistic theory.
notion. And it has to be rejected, especially in my case, because I don't have a conspiracy theory. All the charges about crazy conspiracy theorists do this, do that, QAnon, that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It is completely irrelevant.
to what's going on on JFK facts and in the historical research that me and my friends are undertaking. So that discourse about crazy JFK conspiracy theorists, I tell people, just put it to a side. I don't talk about that. I'm not interested in that. And none of that applies to me. Take your eyes off the theories and come to JFK facts and try and understand what happened and make up your own mind.
So the whole discourse of conspiracy theories where people attack people who doubt the official story because they're crazy and they're QAnon and all that, it's really, it's a bogus argument that doesn't apply. And it's a distraction. And I believe it's an intentional distraction to make people not focus on the facts, but go off into craziness.
because that serves the purposes of the people who want to keep this story secret. Oh, only a crazy person doubts what the government says. You know, that's nonsense. And it's pernicious nonsense because it's really not true. So we want to get past that theoretical realm of craziness. Just put it aside. It has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Thank you so very much for joining us. I think that there is...
going to be a lot of interest amongst our audience in continuing to explore this. And I hope that they'll check out the Substack after listening to this episode and continue to contact us about relevant questions. I'd love to have you back on the show. I'm glad to do it. Be glad to do it. All right. Thanks, Jeff. Have a great rest of your day. Okay. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Conspiracy Theories Book Club. We'd love to hear your feedback.
Reach out to us at conspiracystoriesatspotify.com or theconspiracypod on Instagram. I'd like to thank Jefferson Morley for being our first guest on this series. I can't recommend JFK Facts strongly enough. If you liked this interview, you'll love his books on the CIA. Be sure to tune in next week for our second Conspiracy Theories Book Club episode with Jacob Silverman, where I'll be digging into the wide world of crypto. We'll see you next time.
Conspiracy Theories Book Club is a Spotify podcast. This episode was produced by Julian Borreau and Nick Johnson. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
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