Speaker 1: Welcome to the One on one Podcast with your host
one A Yalla, Welcome back.
Speaker 2: To another episode of the One on one Podcast. I'm
your host. As always, make sure the follow the show
on social media at the One on one Podcast pretty
much all social media platforms. Make sure to check out
the Patreon, Patreon dot com, slash the one Podcast www
dot tj OJP dot com, all the links down in
the description. And today joining us for the very first time,
Larry Hancock, sir, how are you. It's a pleasure to
meet you.
Speaker 3: I'm good, it's great to be here and thanks for
having me.
Speaker 2: Yea, sir? Can you let people know where they can
find you, Larry, if this is the first time they've
heard about you, and where they can find your book,
which we will be covering today, the Oswald Puzzle reconsidering
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Probably the best word to see all my works
and I've done some twelve fourteen books over the last
few years is on Amazon's author page, So just look
for Larry Hancock on books on Amazon. The books are available.
They also puzzles available pretty much everywhere, including Walmart's website,
which is kind of interesting, so you can find it anywhere.
But the other place to see what I'm doing is
I have a blog on WordPress, so it's Larry Hancock
and WordPress. Do a search for that and you'll find me.
Speaker 2: Awesome. And I'll post the links down the description after
the show so people can check it out and check
out the book. I actually I was telling you I
haven't talked about the jfk assassination on my show because
it's one of those conspiracies. Because it is a conspiracy.
I mean, at the end of the.
Speaker 3: Day that.
Speaker 2: The governmental hey, the CIA and the FBI both investigated
that the CI and the FBI had no wrongdoing, so
we're good to go, like that sort of thing. I
don't find that interesting. What I find interesting is what
happens after the fact. So we have the event, which
was obviously the jfk assassination that we know for a
fact happened, right, he was taken out. Now the whole
conspiracy is who actually did it, how did he pull
it off, motivations as to why he would do it, right,
and of course the patsy or the fall guy that
took the hit for this, which we will never truly know.
The actual truth is Lee Harvey Olswalk. How many years, Larry,
have you been at it? Researching the JFK assassination and
topics related to this.
Speaker 3: I started in the mid nineties, so over thirty years
on JFK, but not just JFK, basically political actions in
the sixties and early seventies where there's JFK, MLK, RFK.
I've written on all of them, plus basically the national
security that's my wheelhouse, national security activities during the Cold War.
So yeah, over over three decades, and as you say,
also down lots of rabbit holes. If there were rabbit
holes to be found, I fell in them.
Speaker 2: Is there any in particular that you enjoy the most.
Speaker 3: Larry, I would say I would say researching and writing
about real American history, deniable operations, covert activities, partially because
we know a lot about that now. I mean, everybody
says you're only gonna know what really happened, like fifty
years after the fact. History. History is never immediate, right.
Historians write about the past, and I'm a history buff,
I'm a document buff. So it's satisfying to go back
to something like Vietnam or something like the Tonkin Gulf,
things that were very real to me, that's my period
of time, you know, and find out now what was
really happening that we didn't know at the time. So
I would say that's probably the most satisfying for me,
especially when you find it and find proof of it
in the records.
Speaker 2: So it's safe to say that aliens that didn't take
JFK out, would you.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty good on no on know on that one.
Yeah know on that one. And it wasn't the relatives
of the crew of the Thresher submarine that blamed them
for that. And yeah, there are a few others like that. Yeah.
Out of all of those, we can write at least
some off.
Speaker 2: How has this research putting in so much time? And
there are people who write their doctors who dedicate their
entire lives to studying one particular field of medicine historians
that you know, like yourself, that you're studying this niche areas.
How has researching at least the JFK assassination shaped your
worldview if any.
Speaker 3: At all, It really has shaped my worldview. And you
bring up a very good point, and it's a point
that often gets lost in the conspiracy community, and that is,
if you've studied just one piece of history, you tend
to become fixated. But all history is situational. All needs context.
If you don't know, if I tried to study JFK
without knowing how the CIA really operated, I would lose,
or how the FBI operated. You've got to know how
they're organized, how they're structured, what their standard operating practices are.
So without that kind of context, you go down these
rabbit holes and never come back. So for me, that's
that's been really the biggest thing that I've become aware
of and learned is that you you can't you can't.
You can't slice it too Finally, it's kind of like
painting with too broad a brush. If you do that,
you may you're never going to get the right answer.
It's kind of like again painting, You've got to be
able to do broad brush in detail to make it right.
Speaker 2: How does someone go about writing a book like this
that's very heavy on documents? You know, I want to
focus on what what what the documents and what the
facts say from the people who are providing it. And
a follow up question from that, how do you not
let your thinking be tainted by the conspiracy realm of
things and how do you not let your mind wander
as you're doing this research.
Speaker 3: Boy that that is a real channel. But the first
thing you have to you have to look for what
put it this way. You have to look for what
you find, not what you want to find. The thing
that I'm always most pleased about is if I'm finding
something that I didn't expect, I know I'm on the
right track. If I find what I was thinking was there,
and only that, you know, I'm afraid I'm driving myself.
So when I'm actually going down a trail and find
something unexpected, I think I'm going in the right direction.
And you've got to do that with documents, which means
that you have to look at not just one set
of documents. For example, I've found a lot of things
about CIA operations and practices in general looking at State
Department documents because State department has their version of what's
going on, and if they think the CIA is doing
something stupid or they'll write it down. Same for the
CIA versus the State, same for military intelligence. If you
look at multiple sources in the documents describing the same event,
it becomes very informative. So you've got to bounce this
stuff against each other. You can't just go down one trail.
And then that requires a huge amount of document work,
you know, tens of thousands of pages and learning how
to read the documents one of the things that's been
most valuable for us. And you might be surprised. People
are surprised kind of like, well, you've got documents, but
how do you read them? And the first thing you've
got to do is you've got to be able to
crack the names in the documents, the pseudonyms, the aliases,
the organizations. If you don't go do your homework and
are not able to find that, you won't really even
know what you're reading because it will talk about something
going on, but you don't know who conducted it, who
they're connected to. Just one of the things that's allowed
us to crack a lot of stuff in regard to
JFK assassination is being able to basically what we call
busting pseudonyms, find out the names that are used in
the documents to describe real people, who were they and
what are their aliases? So we contract them ensu who's
really involved and what their networks were long winded answer
to it's a lot of slogging.
Speaker 2: Do you do it by yourself there or do you
have a team that helps you out with this?
Speaker 3: Usually I work with well, usually just a small group
of say like half a dozen people that really get
to be expert in you know, how do we read
the CIA operations files out of the Cuban branch in Miami?
You know, in the whole world, that's a small group
of people, maybe a dozen people. And then to pursue
any particular line of thought, it's it's usually two or
three people that really dig in, which was why in
many of my books I do it with a co author,
And often the co author is really is really the
document expert with the Oswald puzzle, David Boyle, and is
the fellow who had the had the intensity to essentially
construct an organization chart of CIA operations in Miami. Now
you've got to imagine that if I talk about slogging
for me, it's even more for him. So it's it,
and we talk with each other. We share information, like
on the cryptonim busting, you know who ran across it?
A real kind of an interesting thing is there that
aliens and krypton ms were So we're done to confuse
the Soviets. I mean, they're not done to confuse us
and the documents, but they actually get to the point
where they confuse the readers. So a CI officer will
pencil in a little annotation going, oh, this is really
this person or true name or whatever, kind of like, Okay,
we got them. And those notes were never supposed to
be on the documents, right, somebody's just trying to help themselves.
When you start finding those, you make progress.
Speaker 2: So a lot of these documents are safe to say.
They're encoded in some sort of way in case information
gets leaked to foreign power, that way they won't be
able to read it. But then at the same time,
as a layman, a person who is not in the organization,
you can sometimes take things for face value and then
you're led off a completely wrong track.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely if and you will make wrong assumptions. You
maybe assume it's a different organization. One of the most
fascinating things about him is to learn the distribution, who's
getting what information, who's copied, what offices or what copied,
what individuals or what copied. What's happening to the control
of the information And in CIA, one of the things
that's become very helpful to us in regard to le
Avrey Oswald is to find out who is getting information
on him at various points and times and who has
been withhell from compartmentalization can tell you a lot. And
what you find out in Oswald's case in particular, at
different points of time, certain parts of the CIA are
not telling other parts of the CAAA who ask about him.
They're holding back information. And there's only one real interpretation
for that, and that the organization holding the information is
using not him as an agent, but using information about
him for some purposes. So even even distribution can be informative.
Speaker 2: So not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,
But can the documents be trusted Larry at all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they can be trusted. Here's the thing is, the
documents we're talking about are day to day operational documents.
If people could not do their day job without them,
and we know based on them and things that happen. Next,
it's like things that were discussed in the documents did
happen people that discussed You know, you can reality check
the documents. Now. It is true that on occasion fake
documents were creative, but usually the strange thing is the
fake documents that we have found are generally created outside
agencies for some other purpose, you know, to fool someone.
We've even and it's very infrequent, but we've run a
couple of cases where someone outside an agency will do
a document, know enough to do a good document, and
then actually go into the National Archives and plant it.
The good news is, though, you can track that down
because the National Archives, doing their job, has a record
of all their intake, so they can go back and
you and we work with them and it's kind of like,
did you guys ever really take this document in? Nope, no,
we didn't. Aha a case of a particular case of
that is there's a document that circulates about every three years,
seen it like eight times over the decades, and it's
a document saying that Oswald was actually briefed by the
Office and Naval Intelligence for going into Russia, and it's
supposed to be a correspondence between you know, like senior
people at both agencies. Well, now, first of all, that
would never be written down. That's not standard operating practice
to write an inner agency membo after the assassination to
confirm this sort of thing, you know, doesn't happen. But
as it turns out that document never existed in reality,
it was planted to support somebody's books, somebody's story, whatever.
But it can be checked, so we have devices to
check that sort of thing. And people people often ask me,
it's like, well, if somebody makes up a series of
fake documents, would would is that illegal? And the interesting
thing is, if there's no actual crime involved, no fraud, no,
you know, it's sort of like if if it's not
a real government document, there's nothing illegal about circulating it.
If it was never classified, never a real document. You know,
I can the FBI can investigate it. And we know
instances where the FBI or the Air Force or someone
has investigated a document and go it's bogus, and it's like, well,
you're going to prosecute them. Well, it's not a crime
because they didn't profit from it. They didn't. They just
used it for self agran astisement or promoting themselves or
gaining influence. So it's not a crime per se unless
you can't prove it really is part of a fraud.
Speaker 2: That's actually pretty amazing and kind of scary at the
same time, because it's just making me want to trust
the government less because Hey, who's to say. I mean,
that just opens up a whole can of worms. If
you're able to insert information that, hey, it's not a
crime technically, and they nothing happened. That's crazy, Larry, like,
how that could happen?
Speaker 3: But we can find it. I guess that's the good news.
You you ask, is it possible the government does check itself.
I mean I think that's like the FBI can investigate.
They will call in document experts. We're at the point
I have friends who are experts enough to say, you know,
is the record keeping in this document? It's a serial
number ride every you know, look at this document? Is
it right or it's wrong? So the government can investigate
those sort of things. NARA controls it's archives and does
a good job. Like I say, it was, it was
easy to check that Oswald document. It didn't require a
lot of time. It's just like Nara, this thing is
floating around and people are saying, it's real. Did you
ever hold this document? No, So there's you have to
be cautious about, and frankly, you have to be cautious
in the more sensational claims like that you mentioned earlier,
Like one of the frauds that I was talking about
had to do with the aliens at JFK.
Speaker 2: I mean, is there really a document saying that.
Speaker 3: There are there are actually documents saying that the government
knew all about alien contact and had alien contact from
nineteen forty seven. It's called the Majestic Series of Documents,
and that JFK was going to expose this and and
it's yeah, it's a whole thing in and of itself,
so but you know, we've learned how to deal with
that sort of thing. But yeah, you bet, Yeah, I'm
sure you thought it was joking and where he's going,
it's just a pain and a rear another alien JFK.
Speaker 2: Thing I was, I was kidding. I've heard I've heard
that before, but I didn't know it was an actual thing.
You know that there's actual documents and an idea that
it could happen that And this is how little I've
looked into the JFK assassination. And it's kind I'm kind
of doing it backwards with your book because it's more
on you know, you focus on more of Lee Harvey
Oswald and you don't really get into the events of JFK,
even though you have written about them. And I remember
back in I think I was still in in high school,
I read one of the many many books on the
magic bullet. I think at one point where that again,
that's a whole nother rabbit hole, and I don't even
I don't ever think I finished it, but again that
that's the whole thing. But I want to get your
because I heard you. I watched a few of your interviews,
and I heard you talk about memory and how memory
can be tainted. And right off the bat in the
forward by Rex Bradford, he gets into what the Attorney
General wrote the White House, right, the public must be
satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not
have any did not have confederates who are still at large.
Uh So the public must be what it say here,
must be satisfied, like, Hey, this is what we're dishing out,
this is what you're going to accept. But I've heard
you talk about how memory itself can be tainted very easily.
Can you talk a little bit about that, because it
seems that history relies a lot on memory. And then
if the people writing that history, if they're doing their
due diligence, how you guys are doing double checking and
fact checking all these documents. If they're not doing good
job doing that, they weren't there to experience what happened.
You know.
Speaker 3: There have been a lot of really good studies done
on that, and what we learn is say, the experience
of a witness is good for well, it's good until
they start talking to other people. If you can catch
them within an hour or so after the event, take
a statement, get as much detail as you can, you're
pretty good. But once they start circulating and talking to
other people or listening to the news, they become less
and less liable over time, and they essentially absorbed these
things you're talking about gaining the narrative. People can absorb
the narrative, just like because through media, through people, through
We have people that first had witnesses within the first
hour or two who describe things that they later go
back and it stuns me. It's sort of like I've
seen statements taken later by the Warrant Commission that says, well,
I heard more than three shots, but I must have
been wrong. Wait a minute, why do you think you
were wrong? Because the narrative was that there can only
be three shots, and they actually say this in interview,
it's like, I know what I saw, but I must
have been wrong. Well, no, that's not very useful. I'll
give you a plastic example of that and how things
can go bad, not from the JFK assass nation, but
from the RK Asas nation. There was a young woman
who named Santa Serrano, who saw people run away from
the RFK assassination, heard them talk about actually laughing about
the fact that they'd managed to kill RFK. She became
a prime witness in that case. Ultimately she was disregarded
because of a bogus polygraph test that was administered. The
net was that the line was that she had been
brought into a pantry and sat down with other witnesses,
and she'd picked this whole story up from other people,
and it was just it was not true. The problem was,
for the official story is an assistant da out of
Los Angeles had talked to her within minutes before she
ever went anywhere else, and actually ended up writing number
of letters saying she told him exactly what she said
later before she could ever have been contaminated by anyone else.
You have to be able to parse through that stuff.
And they ignored her and they ignored him. After two
or three letters, he just kind of gave up. And
this isn't associate DA. But we've also learned in lots
of experiments, for example, a classroom of students, a professor
can perform and has done, perform experiments in a psychology
class of having something unexpected happened at the part of
the front of the room, in front of the whole class.
Then he has them right down what they saw that day,
open up that thing at the end of or having
them write down at the end of semester what they
recall seeing. Open up their letters, and they're going, well,
I must have made a mistake when I write the
The bottom line is interview witnesses on aspects of detail
of an event weeks, months, years after the fact is
very problematic and just get you in trouble. I'm surprised
now that the new Congressional Committee on Disclosure is going
to Dallas to interview witnesses. You know, it's way too late.
You know they if you go back to their first
day state, let's take those. Don't interview them now. You're
not going to get You're going to get overlays.
Speaker 2: They really went back because one of the main things
I saw keeping up with the news is that I
think Trump unclassified a ton of new documents. Have you
had a chance to look through those? Have you your
colleagues looked through those? Is there any new information that
would perhaps change the outcome of this book at all,
or is there any new revelation that has come from
that at all?
Speaker 3: Well, what's what has happened is he wrote a directive
that literally said, and then the interest of disclosure. Within
fifteen days, I'm appointed a team under the Director of
National Intelligence to come up with a plan to release documents.
Supposedly they submitted it to the White House. We've seen
nothing about it. Within forty five days. There was to
be a plan to address MLK. The first plan was
just JFK, MLK and RFK. We've seen nothing of either
of those. We've see no DO documents. And one of
the troubling things is if you look at like the
fine print in that directive, it also says that the
order will not override the authorities of the agencies involved,
which would still leave them the option of redacting information.
It doesn't require them to unredact anything that's already been released,
you know, which is Okay, what I really want is
all the black off the stuff I can already see,
because I know that's what I need. It doesn't so
so far, it really hasn't led to anything concrete. Hopefully.
You know, there are people that I know, and we're
reaching out to this group, say hell, we know where
to look, we know what to look for, and we
actually know important things that have been withheld. Let us
help you. So far, no response yet, so no, we've
not seen anything new yet. Separately, this Congressional Committee on
Disclosure is going to start holding hearings on a whole
suite of subjects, but all it's been out so far
is literally that they're going to Dallas and interview witnesses,
and my expertise would literally say, don't you know there
are better things that you could be doing with your time.
I've talked to most of those people myself years ago,
so you know, lots of us have that's already on record,
and I still wouldn't consider it good as compared to
the first day statements. See what they said on TV
that day and use that you see.
Speaker 2: How this could fuel more conspiracy Larry where it's kind
of dodgy, very secretive. Do you what are your thoughts
on maybe someone who is very influential that had a
hand in this conspiracy, because that's what it is, right,
they're conspiring against a JFK. I'm sure that there are
various reasons one could come up with to want to
take out a political figure like that, Right, Ideological differences,
political differences. Anyone can talk a crap about a political
person for whatever reason. Now to actually act on something
like this takes it to a whole another level. Right,
But why the secrecy? Do you think that maybe there's
somebody who's still alive who had like a hand in it,
who was influential, and they don't want them to know
and what we see in our lifetimes.
Speaker 3: I don't think the secrecy has anything to do with that.
Strangely enough, from what I know on the road that
I have gone down to some extent, I think the
people that were involved that are still living were quite
it was. It was an very personal act of act.
They considered to be patriotic. I don't think they would
be embarrassed by it now they would be actionable. Yeah,
that's another story, But that's not the issue. The issue
is the fact that at the time, during you know,
a twelve month period, agencies and the president of the time,
the president acted to pre empt and investigation of conspiracy.
We know that you saw some of that in the
first part of the book, because we we tried to
revisit a little bit of why we why we know
that was so egregious, you know, why we can say
factually that the investigation wasn't done that should be done.
It was focused entirely on Oswald as a loan nut,
even even though no motive could be found, you know,
and they had to cherry pick that positioning. But there
were agencies that were involved with Oswald that we're doing
operations built around Oswald, that would not want it. It's embarrassing.
I mean, it's compromised. It's not a big deal now,
should it really shouldn't be a big deal now with
what we know about covert and deniable operations for the
last sixty years, But still there would be people that
would consider it, you know, embarrassing and quite frankly, you know,
these people did not do their duty. They did not
do their duty and sharing information. The FBI didn't reveal
everything it really had, you know, we know the FBI
actually destroyed a couple of documents relating their contacts with Oswald.
We know that the CIA actually investigated and lied about
investigating and said, no, we didn't do it. Cuban connections,
connections to their people, to anti Castro people, to Cuban operators.
They did that investigation because they had leads that said
that could have been in play, but they didn't report
that to anybody, and when asked, they said, no, we
never touched it. Investigating the assassination was the Warrant Commission. Now,
you talked earlier about trust. You know at the time,
if we'd have known that in nineteen sixty five or
nineteen seventy, it would have accrued a lot of distrust.
You know, Can you trust agencies to disclose their own operations?
And I think they're still following on that rule, you know,
like we have to trust our agencies, so we don't
want them to embarrass themselves. I think this is more
about trust and embarrassment than anything else. Is there anyone
that's going to suffer from disclosing that information after sixty
seventy years, I don't think so. The agencies might suffer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. And then
obviously that would a cascade towards a public opinion towards
them and towards the people, And obviously they can't have
that happening. But there seems to be a pattern of
you know, assassinations or attempts where they've had a previous
contact with the suspect, right, the latest one that really
I was going to ask you, if this were to
happen today, do you think somebody could have gotten away
with it? You know, do you think Lee Harvey would
have gotten away with it in today's terms? And I
think he would have done it and would have still
got caught, because if you look at the most recent one,
right with Trump, I mean, what really came of that?
And you know, it's it's few and far between the
assassinations and attempts to have happened throughout history, right, Abraham Lincoln,
all these other guys. You can even put MLK in there,
but it always seems like as soon as it happens, boom,
here's the guy, we got it solved, and then something
happens to him, where hey, dead men tell no tales, right, yeah?
Speaker 3: What? And you know, I I asked that same question myself.
It's kind of like is the JFKs said. And in
terms of the national response, you know, the establishment of
response if you were that, That's what we called it
when I was younger. The establishment. Okay, I know there
are new names for it, but the establishment response is
always the same. And I went back and I did
a book called Surprise Attack, literally to tackle that question.
What do you expect after an event of national consequence,
whether it's an assassination, assassination attempt, something historical called like
the attack on the Liberty or the Pueblo, both of
you know, one of which really started the Vietnam War,
to a higher level, what happens, And the point is
the rush. There's always a rush by any administration, doesn't
matter what party, what politics, whatever. The knee jerk reaction
is always to seize the narrative and to essentially dim
the consequences, like we don't people want people going off
half crocked. Johnson did not want people you know, Oswell's
associated with Cuba and as a Castro supporter, Castro did it.
We need to invade, right. You know, if you're in charge,
you don't want those kind of reactions. If you're we
have an instance in the MLKA assassination of where the
evening of the attack, the Attorney General and the head
of the FBI went on the air and said, we
know who did it. It was one person. There's no conspiracy,
and it had nothing to do with race. Now, everybody
I was there, you know, it's like, no, no, we don't.
But why did they say that when they knew nobody
would believe it. There's this there's this temptation to ice
seze the narrative, and and once you sees the narrative,
how do you escape from it? How do you go
back and really investigate it after you've told every I'm
not even sure that there's evil intent. It's just like
there's this teptation. You do it, and then how do
you recover? You know, oh, ignore what I told you,
trust me next time. It's not going to work. Well.
I think they trapped themselves each and every time. And
do we hear more about it, even if there's investigation,
We don't hear anything about it other than what's going
to end up supporting that original narrative, because otherwise you
lose trust and nobody Republican, Democrat, whatever, whoever's an administration
always wants trust. Now, unfortunately they tend to lose it
because of just those things. But you know, that's human behavior.
That's another story entirely.
Speaker 2: So speaking of trusting the narrative and taking their word
for it. What are some of the more common misconceptions
about Oswalt? Since this book does focus on Oswald the
most one of the ones that I fell for, which
apparently there's no evidence for, is that he was a
CIA asset. Well, what are some of the more common
ones that most people probably believe that turns out to
be bullshit?
Speaker 3: Well, there's two. It's kind of like, there's two limited,
very focused views of Oswald. The Warrant Commission wanted you
to see him as asocial or anti social, no interreactions
with people, no friends, a loner, violent, you know, a
radical activist. This guy's a radical communist. None of that's true.
And how do we know that's not true. We know
it by looking at the long pattern, like several years
of Oswell's dialogues, friends, writings. By nineteen sixty three, he
was writing a lot of monographs and his worldview. He
was talking to people and he would tell people. For example,
he would tell people he thought Kennedy was the person
who could talk with Kruse Chef and dial down the
Cold War, resolved the issue of possible nuclear warfare. You know,
Kennedy is even talking to them about going to the
Moon with the Russians, the joint program, you can, and
with his friends. I mean, this is supposedly the Warrant
Commission wants to see you as antisocial and a loner.
And he's got friends that friends in the military, friends
in Russia. Even he's dating in Russia. He proposes it,
turned down, proposes again, gets married, has two children, you know,
And so this is a person who's also in media
a lot TV and radio and New Orleans. And when
they brought him on and it's actually a radio host
tried to get him to speak out against JFK over Cuba,
OS will pull back and said, basically, no, it's not
President Kennedy. It's years of administration policy towards Cuba that
I oppose. There's no reason that we should not relations.
So you know, if you look at all that detail,
you see that the Warrant Commission was cherry picking. Now,
on the other hand, us conspiracy folks have our own
blame to carry because we have tended to want to
simplify FID matters and make Oswald a tool of the
bad guys, whoever the bad guys were. I mean that
ranges from him being some kind of a contract killer,
like just taking an assignment from the mob, you know,
like okay, somebody decided to pick oswe will to goo
shoot the president, or being a tool of the CIA, whatever.
But when you study his personality and his beliefs, and
he's very much an idealist, more of an idealist in
politics than you could imagine, and more practically took orders
from nobody. This is a guy who in the Marine Corps.
You know he gets he gets the classic thing in
barracks because he's not clean enough and he gets soapd down. Okay,
if you've been on the military you might know what that.
You know, it's not pretty. You know, he ends up,
doesn't like the duties he's getting to sign too much KP.
He confronts the n c O in a club and
throws a drink on the n c O. You know,
this is not a guy. He's not passive. You know,
if he feels he's being picked on, he will speak out.
But he's not violent. He's just you know, just not passive.
But we want to the conspiracists tend to take to
him as an order taker and like have moved him
from taking totally different sets of orders to multiple groups
over a period of time, which is totally out of
character for Oswell. Who who Oswell is the only one
I know who ever actually conducted a strike in a
Soviet factory and got his boss into trouble because he
didn't like the bureaucracy. So he said he was just
going to stop going to meetings and and it's like, oh,
that's the Oswell. I know, this is not the oswol
that you're just going to call up and say, oh,
assassinate the president and he'll just toddle off and do it.
Speaker 2: So he seemed like pretty much a regular guy, a regular,
you know, clean cut guy that was just trying to survive.
Do you have are you familiar at all? And maybe
we can get a little conspiratorial ry where the catcher
in the Rye connection with Oswald allegedly was his favorite book.
Is there any evidence to prove that?
Speaker 3: No, I wouldn't say there's no evidence to prove that,
and I would offer up the other in contrast to
Catcher and to Raye. If you want to get into
Oswell's reading material, which we know a lot about from
his library cards, and you know he's a different person.
I would step back and say, not the not the
Catcher in the Rye image, but he is. He's a
guy that I knew in nineteen sixty eight. He's one
of his best friends. In sixty three called him a
proto hippie. He's a political idealist. He's a in one expense,
he's he's liked socialism, parts of socialism, he likes parts
of capitalism. He wrote a monograph about how you bring
the two together. Yes, you have healthcare, you have education,
but you need this for capitalism. For you know, he's
that kind of guy, and he will he will speak
out on his beliefs. He's not quiet. As a teenager,
he would challenge his friend's parents in the barracks. You
know he's going to be the oddball. I've talked with
Marines who said, yeah, we had guys like that in
the early sixties and the late fifties. They were just characters.
And in nineteen sixty eight, I would it would be
the guy I was standing by it said Okay, let's
go occupy the student union building. And I would go, so,
what is that going to accomplish? And he would go,
I know, but it'll be fun. I don't know. I
don't want to make him passive. He was. He was
an average guy in a way, but he was very
unique in other ways, very intelligent, extremely well read. His officers.
Marine officers said that he could he would discuss geopolitics
with them at their level. And this one guy had
been a graduate of the Foreign Services at Georgetown. So Oswell,
Oswell was different. I guess that's I wouldn't call him
an average guy, but I wouldn't. He's not average in
a necessarily an evil sense. He's just not your average guy.
The marine officer said, Look, you know, and in training,
the other guys are just worried about when the first
leave is going to be, where to find the bars
and the girls, and Oswell is in his bunk reading.
You know, He's not like the other marines.
Speaker 2: So would the sleeper sellar Manchurian candidate theory be out
the window, because that's one that you hear a lot
of about. Where again, this catcher in the ryal where
he was program you said, programmed to kill and they
gave him the string of words that made him snap.
Because if you are convicted, which he was never technically convicted,
is that correct? And they never actually convicted him. If
you have the cameras on you, obviously he said he
was a patsy. Have you been able to decipher that
what exactly he meant by that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we deal a lot with that in the book,
in the latter part of the book as to what
he was talking. Literally, actually the full statement he made was,
I don't know what's going on. They they haven't told
me what I've done. I've been arrested because I worked
in that building, you know, the school book depository I worked.
I did work in that building, and I was in Russia,
And because I was in Russia, They're going to make
me a patsy. It was all about his past. And
literally we maintain in the book that Oswald had no idea,
had a totally different agenda about what was going to
happen on November twenty second. He was following his own
agenda that had nothing to do with JFK, and he
had no idea how he'd been framed. One of the
things it has to be pointed out is the police
had him in custody for almost forty eight hours. They
never showed him the rifle that they took into evidence
and said, lea's this your rifle used to kill the president?
Is this not your rifle? Never ask him that question.
They never showed in the bag that was represented that
he used to carry it in the depository and said
did you make this? Did you bring this this morning?
Never showed him that. They did show the bag to
the guy who drove him to work, who under polygraph
exam said, no, that's not the bag he took to work.
It was a little bag. It was like a sandwich bag.
It's not that bad, and they showed him the real bag.
They did not show Oswald the real bag. Some of
the stuff is so stupid it's hard to follow. And
if you don't know that sort of thing, the evidence
looks a lot better than it really was in fact.
But now I will say another thing that we do
is look very closely at his behavior after being taken
into custody. Oswald never when he when he did something
radical like going to Russia, wants to see what it's
like in Russia. When he's leafletting in New Orleans and
gets into fire. He's never quiet. He will say why
he did it and what he believes and you know
what's going on. He will take credit for it, every
opportunity to do that. In Dallas after the assassination, he
leaves no notes, you know, nothing like, no claims, no agendas,
totally denies everything, tells his brother and his family that
they have no that they're making this up. There's no evidence.
Don't worry about it, it's okay. His main concern with
his wife is did you get the baby the shoes
she needs? Did you get June the new shoes? You know,
we've got to take care of the family through this become.
We feel he had no idea how he had been
framed and how he had been set.
Speaker 2: Up, Larr, Could that have been code that he was
talking in when he was saying all those things. I'm
guessing this was in letters to his wife. Could that
have been code? Maybe?
Speaker 3: Oh that was actually personal, that was actually in person stuff. Again,
one of the answers to that question, and that's a
good question that we look at from an historical standpoint,
is continuity. Is this the way Oswall always talked is
this the language that you know? Is this consistent? Is
there continuity there or is it an anomaly? Now, there are
anomalies in his behavior on November twenty second, and in
the book we offer an explanation for those what he
thought was going to happen. But one of the one
of the big keys to this is these expressions in
this terminology with his wife, with his family was very consistent.
It was the sort of thing that he had been
talking about two weeks before. A week before people had
heard him talking that way. He had visited his wife
the night before discussing getting the family back together. In fact,
one of the reasons he went to talk to his
wife was he was tired of visiting Chu staying with
had just had a baby, staying with the pains. He
wanted to get them back together. Now, if you want
a dose of reality, this tells you that this is
real and not something coded. Because what he asked her,
he asked her, you know, I'm tired of this. I
want to get the family together. I want to move
you into an apartment tomorrow. I want to come back immediately.
And what she said, as a matter of record, is look,
I got a brand new baby, I got a small child.
I'm staying with the lady as a worshiping machine. You
know how many diapers we're going to be dealing with
for the next few weeks. Tell you what you keep
your job, save some money, get an apartment with a
washing machine, and we'll talk after Christmas. You know, that's
real world stuff, that's not code. That is okay and OsO.
So he's going to face the dilemma we talk about.
He had a choice. The reason he went to see
her is he had a choice. He had a choice
of doing something he'd been wanting to do for some months,
which was going to Cuba. We're thinking he was going
to Cuba or moving them back together, and when she
said let's put it on hold, we think he went
one particular way. So to answer your question, I don't
think there's any cod I think it's very real world.
I think we've got some real history.
Speaker 2: My conspiratorial mind sometimes bleeds through, Larry, and I just
can't help but look at it from a different perspective.
Maybe they were speaking in code or something, right, because
you just hear so many things, and you said earlier
that conspiracy heads they want to kind of sort of
simplify thing and kind of just ram it all down.
It's like this was it that, that's that. But this
is such a complex story when you really come to
think about it, and I wanted to get into maybe
you know where some of these things come from as
far as hey, he was a CIA asset, he was
a sleeper cell, he was a man cheering candidate, blah
blah blah, all these things. What are your thoughts on
the James Files James Files guy, because he was one
of the ones that he has I'll be honest, like
he has a very compelling story, like he is telling everything,
but then he's telling things a little bit too good,
almost like he's telling a story and wanting to take
credit for essentially, you know, one of the I don't
want to say, one of the greatest events of history,
but one of the most infamous events within history, because
they took out a president and this guy's telling telling
you about how many cigarettes he smoked and how he
left the bullet casing on top of the fence, and
he's making this whole spectacle out of it. Are these
people planted to spread misinformation or what's his deal? And
what are your thoughts on.
Speaker 3: Him, I can. I can give you that that's one
of the rabbit holes, and I could give you two
or three rabbit holes like that. That that, you know,
took me two or three year. Yes, I did I
buy the James Files VHS videotape the moment it was available.
Yes I did. Okay, yeah, okay, not a day I've
I've been suckered way too much. We won't look at
that side of the expense reporter, it's like how much
money did you spend on what? But long term, the
thing is I came to know. I came to know
two people. One is the person who took the James
File story to the media, and I came to know
him over time, and he altered RECANDID and explained in
detail how he had been had by files and what
files its motive was. I was good friends with another
lady who's deeply into assassination research for years, who had
been in correspondence not only with files, but with several
women who were files as pen pals in prison files.
You would not know it from just his book and
from what you're talking about. He was a long time
he was looking, I mean quite frankly bored he's in
for decades, right, He's got along, he's got a long
thing to serve. He needs something to occupy himself. He
becomes a pen pal with lots of women, gets engaged
to several of them, actually marries one of them, and
gets conjugal visits. Okay, all right, that's that's that side
of the ledger. He and my friend is corresponding to
multiple of these women's at the same time because they're
telling her what's going on with Files in her life.
The other fellow was telling me how he's he talked
with the FBI agent that brought Files to him that
kind of surface File's story. Files convinced him about it,
and this guy bought into it a couple of that Actually,
File's story was sold twice to different people for different
amounts of money, and taken to market twice by a
different account. These people gave me a lot of insight
because they tried to. First of all, they had to
verify files at one level, like the FBI guy had,
and then they dug deeper. And it was only after
they dug deeper that they started see it falling apart.
And one of the things that Files light about many
things that were provable when you started digging. It sounds
great up here, But one of the things that really
exposed him was the fact that he constantly said he
knew nothing about the Kennedy assassination and had no way
of knowing anything about the Kennedy assassination. Well, as it
turns out, the prison library had a series of books
on the Kennedy assassination, and there's nothing that James File
said that couldn't be found in those jfk. Early books.
So he did have source material. Now part of his
story was he part of the Chicago mob. Absolutely, but
there have been a whole host of people, not a host,
that's an exaggeration. There have been eight or nine people
like this who have parlayed parts of their past into
stories for their own purposes. Sometimes there were political purposes. Sometimes,
like for Pile, File, File started writing poems. He started
writing poems about the Kennedy assassination and how he was
a good guy in the Kennedy assassination. He wrote songs.
I mean sorry. But in any event, long, long story short, No,
File did not prove to be credible in the long run,
as many of these people did not. I think a
couple of them. I'm not going to condemn them, because
I think they might be very sincere with their story,
and their story came to be for certain personal reasons.
We have to deal with that. But I'll have to
admit only by seeing the evolution of a lot of
these stories over the decades and knowing people and contacting
people on the inside of the stories, it's the only
way that you know, I was able to deal with
the stories because they all look sound on a certain
level because there's always a certain amount of truth. It's
it's kind of like standard disinformation. This information doesn't work
unless there's some element of truth in it.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, And it always seems like with a lot
of these big stories, like I said, they have people
who you know, with disclosure and with everything else, that
are there to kind of steer how you said the
I forgot what you called it earlier, where they take
the initial to take the narrative over and it's like
it just muddies the waters up even more because this guy,
he's you know, linking the CIA. He said he was
hanging out with Lee Harvey Oswald, you know, the day
the day prior to that, you know, they're they're driving
around blah blah blah, and it makes me think of
I believe it was Jack Ruby when uh, there there
there is it like an interview or something. They're filming him,
and he's like, we're never gonna know the truth, right,
the truth will never see something I'm paraphrasing see the
light of day or something like that. And that's very enigmatic.
That's a very mysterious thing to say, and ask, oh
why not. It's like, because does it does it contain
higher people? Does it involve higher people? And he says yes,
you know, almost like again this grand conspiracy and one
can only think, Larry, how far up the line does
it go?
Speaker 3: Well? And with Jack Ruby, I mean spent a much
longer amount of time on Jack Ruby than James Files.
You're getting much closer to the truth. Yeah, So just
to kind of push past that, Yes, Jack Ruby was
as part of the conspiracy. He was brought into the
conspiracy by Johnny Roselli. He started out with a very
low level role and then after oswelld was captured, which
was not part of the plan, he was given a
totally new role and things become much more complex. So
agreed some of the stories just have a nugget of truth.
They do have truth in them, and you've got to
deal with them. So I don't want to pretend, you know,
I mean, there is a conspiracy there and you have
to track it down and certain people who have elements
of the truth. Ruby's truth actually emerges through analysis of
Ruby doing things and behaving in ways that make no
sense unless he was actually associated with the conspiracy over
some seventy two hours before and after the assassination itself.
I spent an agonizing amount of detail looking at micro
analysis of his movements, of his phone calls, of his behaviors,
and there's certainly a case to be made for his
involvement his prior Jack Ruby. Most people would probably shocked
to know that he was so deeply into Cuban gun
running and during the revolution that he was actually used
by the FBI for a period of over year as
a provisional criminal informant. They provided him equipment for tape recordings.
It's very likely that his contribution to that investigation was
used in the conviction of a gun running effort by
a fellow out of Houston named McCowan. Long story there,
but Jack Ruby's Jack Ruby had part of the real story.
He certainly didn't have the whole story. He just knew
a little bit of it. But he's very dangerous, which
is why basically what happened to him happened to him him.
He was turned into an unreliable source. And we we
won't get too far into it, but no, I do
not think the visit by Jolly West, who is the
CIA LSD specialist, to Ruby in jail on multiple occasions,
and the true observable fact that Ruby became more and
more irrational after those visits up to the comment that
you're talking about is your circumstance. So yeah, I can
do conspiracy, honest.
Speaker 2: That's wild to see. I again, this is this is
why you're the expert, because I had no idea about that.
But that's pretty crazy that again we're dipping into the
conspiracy round with things. How do you think it would
have because this seems like such a clear cut case.
It's so convenient, right, they get Lee Harvey Oswald, he's
coming out what was he coming out of a police
stationers something or other and then boom, Jack Ruby gets
him and that's all she wrote.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was clear cut, and anybody and we know
so much deal in detail about it. It was so suspicious.
The biggest problem the Warren Commission had, honestly with the
whole suppression of information was Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission,
surprisingly enough, other than the FBI, who they didn't trust,
and we know that from their own documents, had only
two investigators. Those two investigators were sent to Dallas to
investigate Ruby and his connections, his connections to the police,
his other connections. They were all over Ruby, especially his
crime connections in his history with people like Rosselli and
with you know, these other things. The Warren Commission actually
dismissed them because they were pointing towards some connections with
the police East and Ruby that might have resulted in
Oswald's death that nobody wanted to see. They dismissed them.
Those two guys said, Okay, we'll leave, we'll resign. Actually
we'll go away, but we want to promise from you
that when you come down to Dallas to question Jack,
we got the right questions. You've got to call us
back and let us participate. The Warrant Commission did not
call them back. Ruby was Ruby could have unraveled at
least one part of the conspiracy, and and it was
very dangerous and people that knew that were very dangerous.
People that knew. I mean, you look at the fact,
and this is hard to take. If you want something
that's hard to take is up to a certain point
in the day of the assassination, Rufe is chipper. He's cheerful,
he's fine. You know, he's good. Everybody that meets him,
it's the same old Jack Ruby. Right after the assassination,
he goes back to his club. He's told he's gotten
several calls from somebody unnamed. Then he makes a call
and there are a couple of calls exchanged with the
guy in La. It was a known contact of John
Roselle with his circuit. And after that Jack falls apart.
He goes to his sisters and he starts throwing up,
and from then on over the weekend, he's a totally
changed person. The obvious reason, he's been told that what
he was doing, his role has changed. You know, it's
kind of like Jack, you know what the game is like, Yeah,
you were you were locating some dirty cops for us
to use. You were doing a good field guy. You're
not minor role. It's kay. You got paid some money.
We even know if banker said he came into some money. Okay,
but you know what the rules are, right Jack, You
either do this. We've got a loose end that wasn't
supposed to be there. You take care of it, or
you know your sister, Jack love You love your sister, right,
JACKI you know what's going to happen if you don't
do this, And that's what happened. He had no choice
even afterwards when you talk about motive. Oswald had no motive.
Ruby had no motive for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. And
it's supposed to be spontaneous, right, but you know that's
not gonna fly. It's just he didn't even go see
the motor Cave, right. It's not like he's a fan
of JFK. He's not like so he didn't even go
see the Motor Kve. But suddenly he's concerned enough to
kill Lee Harvey Oswald. So they asked him what his
motive was. He said, well, I really wanted to make
sure that Jackie didn't have to come back to Dallas
for a trial. Jack is not known for being a
sympathetic you know, Jack is the guy who bounces people
out of his club, kicks people. He's not known for
being a sympathetic individual or ever having talked about Jackie
Kennedy or Jack Kennedy. Later on we found out his
lawyer gave him that motive, and his lawyer admitted, you've
got to have something to tell people, Jack, I can't
just go to court without you here.
Speaker 2: Try this to sympathize with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so like it's it's stupid, but it's better
than nothing.
Speaker 2: WHOA So the actual so the person that might how
you said, hold the actual key here is actually Jack Ruby.
But again he conventely died of a pulmonary embolism in
sixty seven. And who made the call? So he had
this minor role and I guess he they They gave
him a promotion, right, they gave him a promotion midway
he obviously didn't want to do it. And it's it's
it's who has the power to was it governm was
it mob? Was it the illuminati? Larry? Who was it?
Do we have any idea who it could have been?
Speaker 3: Well? I have talked to and worked with We know
the here's what we do know that the we know
that the call to this guy in LA And by
the way, Jack Ruby's explanation and this guy's explanation of
what did you talk about the afternoon of the assassination
when the entire country is talking about the killing of
the president, this guy and Jack Ruby, we're talking, ostensibly,
according to them, about Jack Ruby's dogs and the fact
that you know, Jack might be providing you want to
talk code in a conversation. Dog, Now we can code
in a conversation. Uh yeah, I'm you know, you need
to take care of your dog. We need to your
dogs anyway. But the bottom line is the connection goes
back to, as I said Johnny Roselli, it goes back
to Las Vegas. We have a lawyer who is brought
in to defend uh, Jack Ruby, who gets a call
after Jack Ruby shoots Oswald and and basically the lawyer says,
I knew he was calling. I recognize the voice. Uh
you know, and they and by the way, and the
call they go, you know this, all the money that
we're going to talk about, and this whole defense fund
that we're going to talk about has to go through
Jack's brother, you know, with this has got to be
totally deniable. You're going to make a lot of money
off this. The guy said, I knew it was Johnny
Roselli calling me from Vegas, and we have an FBI
surveillance report putting Johnny Roselli in Vegas at the time.
That gets to be this. The conspiracy itself is a
combination of people. It's not just one individual, and and
they have their strengths. Roselli had had certain strengths, and
he had connections to Dallas and and could make things.
You know, to do something like the attack in Dallas,
you not only need people that are experienced and trained
and enough to do that kind of paramilitary attack and dealing,
but you need field work. I mean, that's the way
things you need to You need to set up things.
You need to know who can be given minor jobs.
How can you get access to information that's ru That's
what Jack Ruby was doing up until Oswald got captured.
Then it all changed.
Speaker 2: They had to be a professional team. Now this Rosellie
guy right has connections to the CIA. That would that
would make one's mind wander as to who could have
been behind this. How proficient was Oswald with a weapon?
Because if we're talking, I've seen I think even did
MythBusters do an episode on the shooting? How you had
to do like two shots and you know, so x
amount of time and that it was I think it
was like impossible. I could be completely remorant wrong. But
how proficient was he with weapons? If at all?
Speaker 3: Well, two things? To make those shots? You had to
operate a bolt action rifle. For anybody who's ever followed,
that means you've got to eject your cell, you got
to work your bolt, you've got to reseat your shell
even though you've got a clip in the rifle, and
you've got to re require a target either through the scope,
which the FBI found was not sighted in correctly. So
if he had used this, so he would have missed.
So okay, let's say he's using the iron sights, he's
got to real Nobody could ever duplicate that they could
get off six shots in three shots in six seconds
but not hit the target. You know, so people always go, well,
you can do you can take those shots. Hey, you
can't take you can take the shots, you can't hit it.
The Marines couldn't duplicate it, the FBI couldn't duplicate it.
Nobody could duplicate it. But the real story on a
well is when he went through basic training, infantry training
basically AI T or Marine infantry training, a fired competent.
I mean, that's truth. You know, he's on the range
a lot. He's firing competent. That's not a problem. Oswald
has shot before he was a kid. You know, his
family talks about going out and hunting, so, you know,
not an expert or anything, but he's used a rifle before,
and he likes guns. Most people in my generation down here, yeah,
guns were routine. But when he was exiting the Marines
and taking his last firing range test, he barely qualified,
which just shows you, again, as anybody shooter knows, if
you're not practicing, you get worse. You've got to be
practicing with that weapon. You've got to have the weapon
sited in just to show you how bad this is.
When we put this out in the book, when the
Warren Commission decided that they had to have a section
on Oswald's shooting ability, their advisor from the Justice Department said,
do not do that. Nobody's going to believe it. You
don't have a case. Leave that whole section out, which
they did not. But it's like anybody who really looks
at the background. There, No, he didn't. He not only
did not have those skills, he had not there was
no practice that could be found. You know, for years
when he had been in Russia, he joined a factory
shooting team because that was kind of expected, and we
know from people that talked with members of the team
he was not a good shot. Then then they laughed
at him. He did buy he bought a shotgun and
went hunting in Russia, and again they laughed at him
because he couldn't hit anything. So there's not really a
good there's a reason why the Justice Department guy said,
don't do that. I would throw one thing other thing
in for peace people that are maybe not as familiar
as how badly this sort of information was obscured by
the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission convened a ballistics panel.
These are guys experienced, experienced weapons experience and wounds experienced ballistics,
and they gave him the supposedly the fatal bullet, the
bullet that went both through Kennedy and Conley, and they
studied extensively and they generated a report that said, no,
this bullet doesn't work. This bullet does not do what
you said it do. It doesn't support the shooting scenario
that you have. It doesn't work. As I recall, there
was something like a dozen people on the panel that
just said it doesn't work. There was one person that
advised the panel who said it worked, Arlen Spector, the
guy who had come up with the shooting scenario for
that bullet, and basically Specter said, well, I believe it
can anyway, and the Warrant Commission just took it and
hit it in the twenty six. In fact, I'm not
even sure it's in the twenty six volumes. They just
it's like, we don't want to see this. This is
not going to be part of the story.
Speaker 2: Yikes. That's not a good look for the for the
for the team at all. It seems like Oswald was
and maybe he wasn't. I was going to say he's,
you know, wrong place, wrong time. No, he was exactly
where he needed to be. But it was calculated even
before that, how you said earlier, he had a whole
different series of events of what was going to go
down that day, and that didn't include being framed for
the assassination of JFK. So where do we go from here, Larry,
what I know? You leave it open for speculation in
the book, and you say, towards the beginning of the
book he was not, you know, this calculated, cold blooded killer.
And towards the end of the book he kind of
say the same. You know, we're presenting the information, you
go through his life and everything, But what's next? Are
we ever going to know the truth theory? Is this
ever going to come and see the light of day?
Speaker 3: Well, after four books on the subject, I would say,
let's put it this way. I've satisfied myself. I can't
claim that it will satisfy anybody else. But I wrote
a book called Tipping Point, which deals with the conspiracy
and the attack. Right, Okay, this is where the here's
how the conspiracy jelled here with the high level motives,
the low level motives, the kind of people that were involved.
That was in a book called Tipping Point, And that
was kind of the summary of all the other work
that I'd done, my best view of how it had
happened and who was involved. But the reason I went
on to write this book with David was because it
had left Oswald out of the equation. It's kind of
like Okay, that's the conspiracy and those are the guys.
But what about Oswald? What's going going on with Oswald?
And how could he be blamed for this? How much
of it was coincidence? How much was it framed? And
one of the things that is important to remember is
if you're going to really patsy someone, it's kind of
like a con job. The easiest way to con somebody
is to say that you're doing what they want to do.
You know they're trying to make money. You offer them
a money making scheme. You know you never got you
never win at the tables. I got a system, you know.
It's You've got to offer him something that they find
is it's in their agenda. And that's what happened with Oswald.
The bad guys really offered him something that fit his agenda,
had nothing to do with JFK, but that made him usable.
And they started that effort as early as August in
New Orleans when they had first approached him. And there's
a whole series of activities that they did with him
to convince him that they were on his side, were
going to offer him something that he wanted, which literally
was to go to Cuba. And join in the Cuban experience,
the Cuban revolution and maybe even carry you know, a
Yankee imperialism, carry this on, participate. So they offered him
something and we can we can describe that. I mean,
we we actually have documents of him saying that he
wanted to do that, trying to go to Cuba, even
talking about hijacking an aircraft to go to Cuba. So
that's why to answer your question is what can we
do to solve this? I think to one extent, we're
not going to go much beyond that in the conspiracy
because it was not investigated, and to the extent that
it was investigated, like the report I talked about earlier,
when the CIA investigates itself, that's gone. You know, if
they found something that implicated some of their people, we're
not going to see it. So I don't know that
we're going to get better on that. I think that
there are some documents that exist in regard to the
CIA and Oswald, the FBI and Oswald that could could
tell us a lot about what they were doing with
Oswald and tell us why it was covered up. So
I think we could understand. I think we will be
able to understand the cover up more. If we get
some of the right that documents that we know existed
at one point in time, we may be able to
undercover a little bit more about the conspiracy because we
know what to look for. I will say this, and
it's not to if the people, if the d n
I and these teams that are looking at revealing documents
don't talk to us, they won't know what they need
to get because it's not just taking what's going to
be given to you and releasing it. That's not the
point that would have happened a long time ago. We
do know what to look for, and I hope they
there's soveral people that could help them. I hope they
go that route. But another long wined answer to your question,
I think we have an insight into the actual conspiracy
among all the many that there could have been, the
actual motive among all the many that there were, and
we have a view of Oswald that I think is
finally more rational, it's more real. Regarding to Ashwall, it
doesn't doesn't make Oswell a good guy, doesn't make him
a bad guy, but it makes him doing his own thing,
which is a lot easier to understand.
Speaker 2: And I think it's important to look at because I
love history as well. I love everything about it. Some
people would say that history has been manipulated, which I mean,
I can't help but agree with them to a certain extent,
because I mean, it's going to happen. How you're saying.
If the CIA found something, what's to say that they
didn't scrub it behind the scenes, And we're never going
to know the truth about that. But I love the
fact that you took this book and you wrote it
from a different perspective. One always focuses right, JFKJFKJFK, the
magic bullet, magic bullet. I've even seen conspiracies where it
was actually the driver of the limousine or whatever you
want to call it that turns around and actually fires
back at JFK. I mean, there's been so many different things,
and this is a multifaceted conspiracy. And you know, even
if you go deeper into the conspiracy, people are like
November twenty second, right, eleven, twenty two, thirty three, So
it was the Freemasons that you know, got to JFK,
the Illuminati, the mob ties. He was gonna I've also
heard he was gonna cut off funding to Israel or
something like that. So I was the Zionist or whoever.
There's so many things going on, and similar to how
we're never gonna truly know probably you know the origins
of life. I don't think we're ever gonna truly truly
know the secret of the Jeff, you know what actually
happened that day? And maybe how you're saying he was
promised all these things, would you say he was more
of a I don't want to call him an idiot,
but a useful idiot to where he kind of fell
for the plan, and like, hey, we got him because
he kind of There are holes in the whole character
of Oswalder, we can find those in some discrepancies, but
he fit the narrative so well. And then on top
of him being dead, which we're never gonna know, how
old would he have been if he survived till this day,
he would have been what eighty something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, eighty something, I think eighty two something like that.
Speaker 2: He fit the narrative. And then they wipe him out,
Jack Ruby croaks you know a little bit after that,
and then who's left other than the main players, Right,
it's a game of chess that they're playing, and would
you say they got away?
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's the thing, and actually that question makes me
feel a little bitter about the whole thing. First of all,
you use the term useful idiot, and that that's interesting
because that doesn't come from us. That comes from a
CIA officer. We have an action quote from cha officer
who who's in this same group that we're talking about,
in this Cuban operations group, and his his daughter asked
him one time she goes and she's open about this,
she said, well, okay, tell me who killed Kennedy. You know,
all right, this is what you talk about at Thanksgiving
at the dinner table. It's like when your dad's been
in the CIA, right, Okay, you should know you're there.
And his response to that was you don't want to know,
which is not a reassuring response. And then then she said,
well what about you? What what about Lee Harvey Oswald?
And his dad said, he was simply a useful idiot.
Now in CIA terminology, that doesn't mean he was an
idiot and not bright. That means that he could be manipulated.
We used him unknowingly. He is, he is an idiot
in terms of what our agenda is he's got his agenda.
So actually that term useful idiot, I think is a
very good descriptor on on your other question and other response.
What makes me feel better about it? Okay, if that's possible.
One of the people, and I did find a few
people who were inside the conspiracy that eventually had heard
about it at the time, not later, I mean at
the time in November nineteen sixty three. One of them
was a young man from Florida who his father was
John Martino, who had been a prisoner inside Cuba, very
anti Castro, and his dad had talked about what was
going to happen to Kennedy when he got to Texas. Okay,
and actually this is on red record. Two of his friends.
He talked to them both right before his death, and
they provided information to the HSCA, the House Select Committee
on Assassinations. He didn't know much, and he didn't claim
that he knew much, but he knew a couple of things,
and he had had a very minor role. He was
a courier, had gone in New Orleans and Dallas. What
he knew was Lee rv Oswell was not the shooter,
never intended to be a shooter was not a part
of the shooting plot. Learvy. Oswell was supposed to be
thought that he was going to meet people at the
Texas School at the Texas Theater who were going to
help him get out of the US and go to Cuba.
But that was not going to happen. He was going
to be killed with evidence planted on him pointing to
Castro and Cuban agents, and Oswell went off the rails.
At twelve thirty, the first part of their plan succeeded.
They killed JFK and a comp polish what they their
mission was. Ozma went off the rails. He got concerned,
He heard things he wasn't supposed to hear. It was
a shock to him that the president had been to
kill what's going on? And he gets himself caught And
for them, these people, Martino and his friends had been
told that their action was going to cause the US
to invade Cuba and replace Castro. That's why they were
in it, That's why they were participating a big part
of it that didn't happen. Eventually they reached the conclusion
that they had been given a false story. These people
had never really intended that to happen. It was just
something to help co opt them and get them to
go along. But I guess your question was, you know,
did they win. The bad news is they won because
they killed JFK. The good news is that they didn't
win what they wanted to win. And it does cheer
me up to think that. You know, he said his
dad was on the phone all afternoon. Everybody was just
going out of their minds because things weren't happening that
should be happening. And I it makes me feel better
to know that they were frustrated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, almost definitely. And I'm just wondering, let's say that, right,
Let's say that all this is true, that he wasn't
the shooter, and that he was actually just this amos,
almost a willing participant, almost right where he actually was,
within the building that he was in, and if he
heard the shots that went off and all of that,
and what his thoughts and reactions would be, right, And
I just wish he would have done more when the
cameras were on him to get rid of that narrative
right to maybe maybe he was maybe he was taking
a little bit LSD Larry. I mean, who knows, right.
Speaker 3: But let's think about this. And this is something David
and I got to in the epilogue. It's kind of like, Okay,
what if what if Oswell doesn't get shot by Ruby?
What's he going to have to say? All right, here's
the bad news. There is a rifle traceable to him
at the scene of the crime where the shooting occurred.
Now is he going to get off with public opinion
being what it was? What's he going to have to say?
It's kind of like, well, he asked my rifle, but
I didn't put it there. I didn't bring it to work.
Oh who did well? I don't know who did well.
Why would they do this to you? I don't know
why they would do it to me? This guy's said
and they said they were Cuban agents trying to help me.
Oh oh we Oh, so your friends are Cuban agents
trying to help you. They're pro Castro and and we're
just kind of getting you know, if he said everything
that he knew that we think he knew, yeah, nobody
would have believed it. He might have just dug himself
in a deeper hole. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think you guys said nobody would have believed them.
If you would have told the truth anyways to begin with,
because the right they had already taken a hold of
the narrative. Larry, you know, just a few more questions
here before we start wrapping up. Are do you believe
maybe there are there people still alive till this day
that know the truth?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think so. I think there are still They're
the ones that that do know are in their eighties. Certainly,
there's no doubt about that. I don't see any reason
that I have actually talked on occasions like could you
persuade somebody to write a note and leave it, you know,
with their attorney for after they pass away, to tell
this story. I don't really expect that's going to happen.
I'm led to believe that. You know, they were still
proud of what they did. There there was you know,
they were acting on their agenda. They were they were
acting to you know, they had been fighting for years
to get rid of Castro in the Cuban regime. So
they viewed it as an act of patriotism. And I
don't think you're going to see anybody recant an act
of patriotism. The ones that would be alive, the CI
officers seem to be. You know, they're not going to embarra.
If they didn't embarrass the agency before, they're not going
to embarrass the agency now. The agency was fighting the
Cod War, they won the CO War, they won the
first COD War. At least they're not gonna recant. So
I don't really know who it would be. The witnesses
we've you know, we're not going to hear anything new
from the witnesses. So no, I think there are people living.
I don't see any of them at risk. I think
the thought that the records might somehow, you know, be
a risk for them, it's not realistic. I don't think
any of that is true because there's nothing in There's
nothing in the records. It wasn't investigated, or when it
was investigated, it disappeared. Right.
Speaker 2: You think RFK Junior knows, No.
Speaker 3: He suspects. I don't think he's heard anything other than
what we've discussed. I mean, I know people that know him.
I talked to him briefly on a couple of occasions.
He might not even remember I talked to him about
the RFKS as nation, not JFK. But I know I
don't think I think he has the same suspicions from
high level people who heard it. It's kind of like
this useful idiot thing. Did he hear from people you
would think know that you know? But on November the
twenty second, we know that Robert Kennedy Bobby made two
telephone calls. The first call was to the director of
the CIA to ask him, and Bobby said, this, did
the CIA kill my brother? Now? The strangest thing is
nobody ever asked Bobby, why did you think they would?
What led you? Why is this your first call? Now
Macau told you no, but he's not CIA's just the
director who knows. But why would you think that? The
second call was to a friend of his in an
Anticastro group who was working on a new new project
to launch a new regime change operation against Castro, and
he called him and wanted to talk to and he said, literally,
your people did it. Nobody asked Bobby why he said that,
you know? What did Bobby know? What did Bobby suspect?
We know from documents and things that have been revealed
that both Bobby and Jackie told the Russians sent contacts
to tell the Russians that they knew it wasn't the Russians,
they knew it was a domestic conspiracy, or they suspect
that it was a domestic conspiracy. One of the documents
that we're not going to get is that William Manchester
interviewed Jackie and several others witnesses about these sorts of things,
and because he was writing a book on the assassination,
William Manchester right afterwards the Kennedy family Jackie seal those
records for seventy five years as to what she told Manchester,
it's not part of the JFK collection. We're not going
to get that as any part of I think that
would tell us more, you know, what Jackie and Bobby
suspected and why they suspected. It would tell us any
more more than any document that we're going to get.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's why RFK was taken out. Perhaps, I mean,
that's just an idea.
Speaker 3: Maybe, I mean that has been expressed. It's I have
one of the issues. Of course, I was there when
RFK was campaigning. I was a big part of on
campus and part of what was going on at the time.
Even if RFK had not become president, there's no doubt
that RFK would have been part of the next administration,
you know, and what role is probably not Attorney general again,
but he would have had a role. He would have
been a big decision maker in any Humphrey administration. And
one of the things that you have to look at.
I'm not so sure that if Robert had wanted to
disclose what he knew and raise the roof, he would
have done it. I mean, he would have done it
what he could. I My particular thing is I think
his role either as a president or you know, that
threatened people outside the jail. It wasn't just about JFF assassination.
It was Bobby and his inclination to do things that
were kind of like his brothers. It's sort of like
he's for the same sorts of thing as his brother was.
Who wouldn't like that. It's not so much just the
JFK assassination. It's just what administration policies would Bobby and
as president or Bobby is a major figure pursue. That's
the danger.
Speaker 2: I guess we'll never know, Larry right, I mean, this
is a lot of rabbit holes, a lot of I
find it super fascinating, super interesting, And I look at
the JFK assassination almost like a thought experiment, right, It
makes you think, makes you wonder we have the mainstream ideas. Man,
I'm gonna take James Files word on it. I think
maybe he did it. He's a good storyteller. Who knows.
But Larry, do you have anything planned? I know you've
written many, many books, You've researched this for a lot
of years. Do you have any other plans on other
books coming out here soon? What can people expect from
you now?
Speaker 3: David and I are still still working on some of
the aspects of this. You know, who would have set
Lee Oswald? Harvey Oswell, how did that really happen? Who
traveled with him after New Orleans? We think maybe we
can piece some of those things together, really take this
to a finer level of detail, and kind of like,
there are certain number of suspects, could you condense the
number a little bit? So we plan to keep working
on that. For myself, you know, it has been thirty
five years. I'm kind of thinking I need another hobby.
You know, there's a telescope behind me. Maybe I should
take that out again. It's like, you know, I used
to go fishing. Was life better before all the history.
I love the history just like you. I love it.
I don't doubt that I'll ever get away with it,
but I keep going. You know, Okay, options.
Speaker 2: You don't look at day past thirty, Larry. You look great,
all right.
Speaker 3: So I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Keep up the great work. I really appreciate you talking
to me today. And if I've learned anything from today's
interview is that the aliens did really take JFK out.
So I'm going to tell my kids that's what happened,
and hopefully they tell their kids that that's what happens.
Speaker 3: I've got a program for you. Do a search on
the Dark Skies television series.
Speaker 2: I've heard about that is that on Netflix.
Speaker 3: Dark Skies is like the perfect thing. It's like Bobby
Kennedy investigates his brother's assassinations and finds it all due
to the aliens. Like it's it's the perfect convergence of
all these conspiracies. It's great. You know, it's Bobby Kennedy
against the aliens for assassinating JFK. You know, so you
might want to share that with them. That'll that'll go there.
Speaker 2: There's nothing new under the sun, that's for sure.
Speaker 3: You know, when it first came on television. I'm going,
oh finally, okay, good, We're done, Larry.
Speaker 2: Any closing thoughts. You want to let people know where
they can find you one more time, if anyone hasn't
heard of you or anything else, you want to plug
and say.
Speaker 3: If people do choose to read the book, you know,
I'll be talking about it on the blog. In any
of the books that there are four books, someone would
have talked. The whole thought was if there was a conspiracy,
would someone talk? And I found a few people that did,
but only to their wives and lawyers. You know, anybody
that talks to the public, irrespective of James files, don't
believe them if they talk to their you know, near
death confessions are the best kind that you can get.
You know, if there, if they did it, don't expect
them to go to the media. So someone would have
talked Nexus, which goes into this in regard to CIA
assassinations and regime change and what it looks like. And
then Tipping pointed this. But if anyone reads those and
have any questions, I'm very accessible by email and I'm
happy to chat about it. I don't, as you say,
we're never going to have exactly the final answer, but
I'm happy to discuss the one I found.
Speaker 2: I appreciate your time. Larry, thank you so much again
for speaking with me today. We'll make sure to check
out the Oswald puzzle reconsidering Lee Harvey Oswald, available Amazon
or wherever just look up. Larry Hancock has done a
ton of work on the subject. I was very excited
to talk to him today because again, this is something
that I haven't really dive down the rabbit hole so much,
and it's uncovered. It's uncovered a lot of things for me,
so I'm happy you were here with me tonight. Larry,
thank you so much, and as always, everyone make sure
to check out the show on social media at the
one podcast www dot tj ojp dot com, comment, like, share, subscribe,
all that good stuff, and as always, will catch you
on the next one. Goodbye now,