I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible. So today's guest is Gus Russo. He's an investigative reporter and writer. He's an author of many books on subjects from JFK to Fidel Castro, gangsters, the FBI, CIA, and so, Gus, g it's great to have you with us today.
Oh, it's pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
You're sort of one of these people that has dug into everything related to mart I wanted to talk you about. RFK Junior is resurrecting a conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the murder of President John F.
Kennedy.
And you've written some You've read a lot about this in fact, and so could you tell us a little bit about that conspiracy it's something that just doesn't seem to die, and Jerry and I get it all the time.
It's one of the craziest ones because there's no evidence at all that the CIA did it. It's just total theory based on pretty much nothing. I lived through it. I was interested in this case back in the seventies. I attended the House Select Committee on Assassination's hearings. The
open hearings interviewed a lot of people. My theory about why they say this is that we all lived through the Church Committee years and when the Church Committee fingered the CIA for doing all these plots around the world, it left an impression on the generation that the CIA is the source of all evil. And I think we all might agree that those operations were almost entirely the brainch out of the white houses that were around, whether
it's Eisenhower or Kennedy. But a young generation thought that the CIA masterminded all these plots and coups and everything, and that stuck with a lot of people, even in the face of subsequent evidence to the contrary. Do you really look at it hard? What they go back to is a phrase that President Kennedy allegedly said after the Bay pig. Tom Wicker wrote an article in The New York Times about the Bay of Pigs and thirty pages in he put a quotation in there that came from
an anonymous source that heard from another anonymous source. The President Kennedy said, I'm going to tear the CIA to one thousand pieces. There's no way to know if you ever said it, because we have no way of knowing where it came from. I don't believe he ever said it, and the people of the intelligence field who were back and there in those days also say they have no
idea that he ever said it. In fact, President Kennedy doubled the CIA's budget and ivoyed and got an internal CIA report of their relationship with all presidential administrations, and by far the best relationship they had was with JFK. That's what they said. So that's it. Based on this quote that Kennedy was going to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces, which he obviously didn't do, and that he fired Alan Dulles, who was the CIA director at the time of the Bay of Pigs, and he didn't
fire Alan Dulles. In reality, all you have to do is read Dulles's biographies, and you'll see that Dulles offered his resignation after the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy turned him down. Kennedy said, no, Alan, you're a friend of the family. We wanted you to stay on when you wanted to retire. Anyway, you only stayed on because we begged you to. He didn't want to be there, and he was saying, come on, let me resign and you'll look better and I'll be retired, but please stay on.
He offered three times to resign. Finally, in the fall, four or five months after the Bad Pigs, Kennedy said, I guess you should go because the heat is getting too much. But thank you, you've been great. He stayed close friends with Dallan Dallas, as did Robert Kennedy. We
have all the letters back and forth between them. One of the most telling things is that when LBJ set up the Warrant Commission, it was Robert Kennedy who pretty much demanded that Johnson put Dulles on on the warrant commission. He was like an uncle to the book, to the Kennedy brothers, and against that they have this one alleged quote.
If Kennedy was going to rip the CIA in one thousand pieces, replace it with something else, replace personnel as a There'd be paperwork involved in that right from Kennedy's paper. He'd be giving orders. There'd be discussions that would be in the NSC. So making a simple declarative sentence, whether he made it or not, doesn't mean he's.
Going to file through.
And if he was going to follow through, CIA would know it because they would know through the NSC they'd be talking about replacements personnel.
There's no evidence of any of that.
Let me ask you, there are some real conspiracies, and I think you did some digging in front out there actually is a conspiracy around this, and the conspiracy is that the Soviet intelligence services used money and their influence to try to push this conspiracy theory. Is that true?
Yeah, that's true. Disinformation is certainly real, and I think what we're going through now, it's my contention that they perfected disinformation that the Soviets at the time came up with, The CIA created aids, The CIA tried to kill the pope. The CII did everything, but this was their laboratory, the Kennedy case, and it started immediately after with getting books
published magazine articles, newspaper articles. They would read our stuff, as you know, they read our papers and books and find a way to insert into our own narrative little things that would seem to make sense. I will agree, I wouldn't call that a conspiracy. That's just intelligence world.
Well, Russian intelligences conspired to say what can we do to create a price grotory and put it into their systems. So in a way, conspiracy just more than one person coming up with the plan to do something. And frankly, Gus there was some connections between the CIA and the JFK assassination, not in the fact that any CIA people were involved in it. But as you remember, there was a Russian, a Soviet defector named Urinasenko who came to the United States around that time, and he had known
Lee Harvey Oswald. He had seen Lee Harvey Oswald's file when he worked for the KGB second chief director at the internal part of it. Sure, of course, this created inside the government a big oh my god, you know where the Russians involved in the assassination. They've interviewed him and they looked at him and they thought that, you know, there's no way he would because he's a marine and
he defected to the Soviet Union. Therefore, they'd be greatly interested in him and they would use him as a potential assassin.
LB Jay knew pretty quickly that Russia had nothing to do with it because NSA was bugging Nikita's Dasha and his other residences and they heard him talking about, oh my god, how did this happen? This guy lived here, Oh my god, they're going to think we did it. And the NSA reported that back to Johnson and that
sort of put that away for the government. We knew Russia didn't have anything to do with it, but Russia was so concerned that we might think that they sent Uri over to make sure we knew they had nothing
to do with it. But for me, the fascinating mystery, I don't want to say conspiracy, but the lasting mystery of that whole thing is what happened in Mexico with Oswald hanging with Cubans for about a week, and that is I've dug up a lot of things there that make it look like they knew what was going to happen, that Oswald was going to do this, and that has never been investigated by the government at all Warren Commission didn't look into it. The House Committee spent two days
down there. Our researcher. We hired a detective for a documentary I did, and we spent he spent about a year dredging up embassy sources who were there when Oswald was there for us, and we learned a lot. And by the way, I interviewed during Thesenko for a documentary I did with Peter Jennings probably twenty years ago. When I did a show with Crouplind back in ninety three called Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? It was a big undertaking. We spent two years traveling the world interviewing. We had
a big budget. Our senior producer, Mike Sullivan, said, let's find out first if Oswald pulled the trigger, let's see who shot him first, and we could work back words from him. That's the easiest way to do it. And so we spent the first few months trying to figure out, forensically, ballistically who did it, and it was overwhelming. I was waldfire all the shots, and then it became a lot easier to see who he was connected to, which was nobody,
and we went We really worked hard. We tried to do the due diligence and it just didn't hang up.
Hold up.
He was the ultimate loaner, no doubt about it.
I think that's why conspiracies getting built up, right, How is it possible that this absolute loser could impact world history? And so people have to create stories to fill that void.
And Lee Harvey Alliswall had a very powerful gun, that Carcato rifle. We spoke to all the ballistics people, this is a gun you did not want to get in front of. This thing is like a cannon. And he was good with it. I held his Marine targets in my hand, and he was a good shooter at two hundred yards with a bolt action weapon. I can go up with this ballistic stuff forever. But I'd just say that this was an easy shot. People who say it was a hard shot, I asked him, and where did
you hear that? And they say, I don't know if somebody told me. When you really look at it, it was a really easy shot. You only hit twice, two hits in nine seconds from a target that's moving slowly away from him. It was nothing anybody could have learned to do that shot.
In a CIA officers We're not saying there's no conspiracy, there's no possibility of it. There are permutations be between Oswald did it on his own and Oswald was a dupe and a stooge of the Russians.
Of the CIA.
It certainly possibly he could have mentioned this too while he was in Mexican talking to the Soviets.
A low level guy would write it up and send it in in the KGB archives.
Or he could have told Cuban intelligence officers when he's down there, I'm going to get Kennedy.
Which does exactly what he said. It's exactly what he said.
Yeah. So for us though, it's is there proof?
And in the intelligence world you don't want to be pretty sure when the possibility of getting it wrong is nuclear war.
Right. When the Warren.
Report was written, the concern was that if people really came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that it was the Soviets that did it. They were concerned that there'd be forty million dead inside of three hours, right if we point the finger wrongly and things get out of control. So today we don't really think about that so much, except of course, when we have WMD in Iraq, where Agency officers, analysts who Johnny and I know some of them.
They were pretty darn sure that there was WMD in Iraq, right, I mean they Saddam said he had it. There was reporting that it was there. He had it in the past, He's threatened to use it. But we didn't have proof that it was there. We just were like pretty sure. And so same for the Warren report.
Weld under the second, Well, we take a quick break.
And we're back.
I've been a few, literally thousands of people on this subject over the years, and what I concluded, what I learned from them. Johnson feared World War three was going to break out, and he was terrified of that. So when the Warrant Commission was formed, he instructed the FBI to not investigate Mexico City. He was afraid of where it might lead. And I'm hanging on my wall a letter from the FBI guy who went down to Mexico City, the only Spanish speaker who could go down and investigate
the Cubans. He went down that night and he was called in his hotel rooms and he was told that Johnson had told Hoover to tell him, do not leave your room, don't talk to anybody while the trail was hot. I just don't want to go there. He was terrified.
Even though he knew that the Kruse Jef didn't push this thing, he was worried that if they found out the Castro was behind it, Americans would demand retaliation against Castro, which would bring the Russians in like they had a year earlier during the Missile crisis, which was right at the front of Johnson's mind. The crisis had just happened, so he was worried that Cuba might have had something to do with this, or was involved or had knowledge, and he didn't want to go there. So there was
no investigation of Oswald in Mexico. And another interesting thing, Bobby Kennedy was the one who put Dulls, his family friend, on the Warren Commission. Dulles knew about the plots that Robert Kennedy with the CIA were trying to pull off
against Fidel, and Dulles never told the other commissioners. They were dying to know why a pro Castro guy like Oswald would shoot Kennedy, and Dallas said, I have no idea, and they looked at him and said, were we doing anything to piss off Lee, Harvey Oswald and the Warren Commission attorneys that I've interviewed said when they found out about these plots via the Church Committee, they were incensed at the lives of Alan Dulles. They were looking for
this motive. Why a pro Castro guy would shoot Kennedy made no sense. We were at peace with Castro allegedly, and Dulles zipped up. That was a favorite of Robert Kennedy.
In my opinion, we've come to the conclusion that the big conspiracy that the CIA was behind it is not true. But are there things that still need to be figured out or where we should still look into.
For me, the only thing would get my attention in the newspaper if Castro opened up his archives, which won't happen. And also there are archives in Mexico City that we got a peek at because they did their own investigation in Mexico. The National Archives, at my behest tried for years to get those from Mexico and couldn't get them. The sneak peaks we've had are that there was Cuban contact with Oswald. I'll tell you the story we were told by the operatives who were in the Cuban embassy
in Mexico City who were there at the time. They said that Oswald came in. They didn't know who he was, and when he didn't get a visa, immediately he went nuts. And then he went over to the Russian embassy and went nuts. And he thought they would know of him because he had handed out leaflets in New New Orleans pro Castro and he wanted to be at whatever a spy for Fidel and he got so mad, and according to Castro, we know this from Castro's own lips. Oswald said,
I'll kill that bastard Kennedy for you. I'll show you now. Castro told us that through telling that to his confidants, who reported it back to the FBI. After he says that Cuban intelligence operatives in that embassy started to hang out with this guy during the week that he was there, which we know nothing, or we felt we knew nothing. They wanted to suss this guy out, see if he was a nutter, if he really was going to do this. They even offered him money, and they told us in
our documentary that he turned it down. It wasn't about money, it was ideology. They said, if you do this, you'll be a herod Keep in mind when people ask me if there was a conspiracy, I say, well, it depends on your definition. It's a conspiracy of silence. I'm convinced that Cubans knew he was going to try to do it and encouraged him because he'd Jeff Gabe been trying to get a Castro for two years. I don't know
if you know Brian Ltel, former CIA officer. He ran the Cuba desk for the agency in the eighties, and they told Brian that well. The morning of the assassination, he was in the G two headquarters Cuban Intelligence in Havana when work came down from Fidel to redirect all the surveillance issues that were pointed at Miami, where JM waves CIA base was, and turned them to Texas. This is from a Cuban defector to Brian Lttel, and why
do you want to point it Texas. The answer was something's going to happen, and I want to be the first to note from Fidel. So the word got to him that something might happen in Texas and he wanted to know immediately. And I believe this got back to Johnson this kind of stuff because he was in touch with, mixed with the Mexicans. He had great friends in Mexicano, including the president. And I'm convinced from people I spoke to that he was told that night there's more to
this than just this guy. He was hanging out with the wrong people, and that this gets out, it's all gonna blow up. And Johnson just said, I'm not going there.
And CIA, we have something called duty to warn.
It's a law, and.
If we know about an assassination attempt coming up against a foreign official, even an unfriendly one, we are honor not honored, we are legally bound.
To tell them this.
Now, we don't have to go into great detail, we don't have to give away sourcing. And I can remember one time in the Philippines there was an advansaer of a country that is very hastile to us, and we had heard that Islamis were looking to kill him and I had to have a meeting with him. I sat down, his bodyguards were there and I said, look, but you know who I am.
I'm the with CIA and does a plot to kill you?
And he laughed because in their you know, this authoritarian government, they would never do this, and he laughed at me, but he did increase his security. So they know the Russian, the Russians of the Cubans wouldn't do.
That, so they didn't hire him. So there goes the cute Castro did it conspiracy, but Castro knew And if you call that a conspiracy, find in fact, we were told many details from these Cuban operatives that they encouraged him Oswald if he wanted to try this, and that he'd be a hero, even to the extent that they said, we'll rescue you if you pulled this off. That's what we I only had one source on that, so I didn't put it in my book, but I believe him.
He said Oswald was on his way to rendezvous with the Russians when Officer Tippitt stopped him. And remember he shot Officer Tippet. Most people forget about that, poor guy he shot four times point blank by Oswald. So tippittt may have stopped at rendezvous and the furthest extension of that story is he said, we told Oswald would fly him to Havana if he pulled this off, and he said, but we weren't going to do that I said, what
were you going to do? So we're going to dump him into the Gulf of mexic Co.
So we've talked a little bit about this, about the CIA is involved or did it? And it comes up again and again. So to go back to where we started on RFK Junior, there's this view and then Amaryllis Fox, who is married to his son, former CIA officer for a couple of years inside, there's this. All we need to do is get into the CIA archives. We get into the intelligen Comunity archives. It'll answer this question for us.
And we've talked about what that actually means and why stuff might not yet be put out because there are real reasons for that, not to cover up reasons for that. You're someone who digs into the paperwork and the archives and the research. What is your view on what the CIA is put out and do you think there's a smoking gun and what hasn't been put out?
Oh, not at all. I've been researching at the National Archives since the eighties, and I also went to the CIA a couple times because they wanted to hear more about what I had uncovered in Mexico. They brought me down to headquarters. But as far as what the CIA has, understand that everything has been released. What these people are talking about are cleaner versions of some of these pages.
Every page is out, some with reactions. They want those reactions unredacted, those reactions and I've got them their microscopic. It's not like there's gonna be a great new narrative. It's two words, and it's usually a person's name. It's all sources and I've seen the documents and that's all it can be. There's not going to be any smoking gun.
It's gonna be a name of some Cuban guy who was talking to a CIA guy in my in Nevada, and he would get killed if that came out, and he may still be alive because these guys were in their twenties and I'm against getting rid of those redactions. Promises were made to people, as you guys know when you're out there, and we'll protect you if you talk to us. You can't just change your mind fifty years later and say, well, under the pressure of Oliver Stone,
we're going to release your name. I have seen some of the redactions they've let out, and it's terrible. Names of agents of the sources organiz his crime sources in Chicago, so that's what's left. I've seen all the documents, and the archivists have seen them all, and the review board who looked at this in the nineties saw everything. It's gonna be so anti climactic, you're not gonna believe it.
We'll be right back, and we're back.
I'm gonna tell you now, if I thought that the US government was behind killing the president of United States, I would tell people, Yeah, I don't know, Like, give me your sense of the Oliver Stones JFK movie and where that conspiracy theory story came from.
I was there when he filmed it. This was in the around nineteen ninety. He contacted me because he knew that I knew where all the sources worked. I had been interviewing them for documentaries. I hadn't written the book yet, but he said, you could be really helpful. I'm doing this movie. So he brings me to Hollywood and I meet with him. I didn't know he was going to go after Jim Garrison at the time, so I said, oh, yeah, I love to help. I want to see how you
do this. I'd never been around a fifty million dollar movie production. When I eventually read the script and found out it was Garrison, I pulled away from the whole thing, but I was there for a couple months of the project. A couple months of the project and where that comes from in his mind. He bought into Jim Garrison right the New Orleans DA who went after Clay Shaw, who was accused by the KGB's disinformation of being a CIA officer who killed Kennedy, and Garrison bought at hook Line
and Sinker. Oliver Stone understandably needed a protagonist for a Kennedy assassination story, which he was dying to tell. He told me, he said, this was the movie I always wanted to make, but I didn't have the clout until I won a bunch of Academy Awards. Now I had the cloud to ask for the money to do it. He sort of identified, I think with Garrison, because Oliver Stone is kind of a black sheep in Hollywood. Jim Garrison was a black sheep among das. It was the
white knight against everybody. Well, that's who Oliver Stone is. This is my own psychological diagnosis here, And I don't know what Oliver really believes about those witnesses that Clay that Jim Garrison had because they all eventually admitted they lied. Jim Garrison forced them to lie on the witness stand because he was known to pressure people like that. That
was his history in New Orleans. He was not a good guy and he destroyed a lot of lives over the course of his life with the accusations, with persecutions and indictments that went nowhere. Oliver Stone wanted to make sense of Vietnam because he was traumatized by it and this was the only thing that made sense to him. That Kennedy was killed so they could escalate the war and at last the war made sense to him. And that's what his conclusion was. He had no evidence of it.
He just used Garrison's evidence, which was meaningless because.
RFK Junior said, and I haven't looked into this that deeply, but he has said he suspects that CIA was involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
There's a six fear cutter up.
You know.
The war information was run by Alan Dallas, who was ahead of the CIA, who my uncle fired because I was founding. Yeah, it was a plot, it was a conspiracy. There were multiple people involved.
Why do you think this is this has come up, why he still believes it's now and what are the conspiracy theories on this one?
First, I'm not at the expert in RFK. I know some things about it peripherally. But where that seems to come from is Srahan kept the diary, and in the diary he kept writing or Okay must die, and it looked to some people like he'd been hypnotized to do this. He wrote it over and over again, and they said he's a Manchurian candidate. Again, no evidence, it just it's just a convenient thing. There's no link to him in
the CIA. And he also ballistically he did it, but it's just people want and he says he also said, I can't remember pulling the trigger. Another Manchurian candidate thing, and who does Manchurian candidates but the CIA, of course they don't. But that I know, that's the story that we get from the movies, and uh, they buy into this RFK. You know he's into a lot of conspiracy theories. And I can send you guys a video it's on YouTube of Surehand giving a lucid, sober confession to the
whole thing. He tells David Frost, I did it. I'm sorry I was. I regret it, but he admitted doing it. The RFK probably knows the same theories about his uncle that seemed to be on the surface meaningful, like I'll kill out destroy the CIA. There was no enmity between the Kennedys and the agency at all, so the CIA would not want to kill Robert Kennedy. They never hated him, They never hated Jack.
It's I don't know, if anything, they probably he Kennedy's like Eisenhower before and probably pushed the CIA to do too much. It is too It was too handy and easy to get things done in secret by the CIA, rather than go through the whole political process and get people on board.
Yeah.
I've got a great quote from Robert Kennedy and from JFK, two great quotes from them. Just before they both said to the press that any errors in political operations were not the fault of the CIA. They did their job. They were instructed by different administrations to do what they did. They apologized for all these things in the agency were great people, and Kennedy doubled their budget. This idea that Robert Kennedy was hated by the CIA. There's nothing there,
absolutely nothing to answer your question. I can't get inside Robert Kennedy's mind except that he's read the Manchurian Candidate or something. You know.
He's gone on about something called Operation mocking Bird. There's not much out there on it. But there was an Operation mocking Bird.
And this goes back.
To the early sixties and it was one of the things that the CIA got wrong that came out in the Church Commission, and it was the CIA and the FBI went after a couple of journalists because CIA information isual security information was leaking. And the person who authorized this bugging of journalists was none other than Robert Kennedy. So, yeah, telling him to do it. And yet this is but it sounds cool, well appupation Mockingbird, but yeah, look into it. It's actually there's like way less there.
Than meets theater.
Robert Kennedy was so into covert action. He authorised the wire taps on Martin Luther King, the illegal wiretaps. He would go down to JM Wave CIA based in Florida during the height of these Cuban operations and walk in and tear documents off the teletype and just walk out with a classified need to know papers and the people down there who I spoke to yelled at it. What are where are you going with this stuff? He was training Cuban exiles that were friends of his in his
backyard at hip Hickory Hill. They were doing training exercises. He didn't understand any tradecraft. It was going to blow everything up, and it did. But he loved this stuff. That was not an enemy thing with the CIA. He really dug it. He wanted to be a spy. I think we just cann undo the enmity that came out for the Agency in the seventies with the church stuff. That's that's still faced with a lot of people, right.
And I don't want to speak ill of the Kennedys here either. Their mindset they're coming out of they're worried that the world is going to be destroyed, and their mindset was set in fighting the Nazis fifteen years before and fighting the Japanese and like the saving mankind. And we look at our mindsets today, our mentality is very different than within what they were trying to do, which arguably I don't even think I was build a better for your world if they were willing to get their hands dirty.
Yeah, that's basically there was the Cold War hysteria. But I will say the CIA guys who orchestrated the Bay of Pigs told me that it was more than that. They said the Kennedies personally had it in for Pidel. It was a personal thing because they lost to him after the at the Bay of Pigs, and Fidel spent months traveling the world and making fun of the camp and he's calling them Cretans and just rubbing their nose in it constantly that we beat the big bully, and
that really chafed that the Kennedys. According to the CIA officers, they said this was a personal thing between the Kennedy brothers and the Castro brothers. And I think some of that plays into it too, because the Kennedys weren't used to losing anything obviously.
You know, incredible investigative reporter. I read your book Best of Enemies about a Russian KGB officer, a Soviet and then Russian KGB officer Ganadi Vassilinko. I have to say I'm amazed at how much stuff you dug up because I worked directly on the issues that led to the arrest of Robert Hansen and the illegals who arrested in twenty ten, Russian legals wasss than twenty ten, and all
these other kind of things. It's all these people that are in your book, Jack Platt, James, Mike Rochford, Paul Redmond, They're all I was all worked very closely with them. So I was really impressed with that.
Yeah, that story came to me Jack Platt called. I'd met Jack just in passing at a book party years before this, and he called me up one day out of the blue and said that Robert de Niro said, you're the guy to do my book affects you. I said, excuse me, Jack Platt, I said, yeah, I want to do a book about me and my friend me and my friend Ganati. And I said, sounds interesting because I knew a little bit about it and I signed on to it. But yeah, I work real hard on these projects.
I call up everybody till they agree to talk to me, and sometimes you just get a crumb, and sometimes you get something you can bring it full circle. These assets, these sources that with the FBI and the CIA used in the sixties to talk about Cuba or Russia. You're putting them in harm's way, and now we're going to release their names because Oliver Stone wants you to. It's inside it.
I've said this many times, probably even on this podcast. The bulk of the classified information that the CIA gets from human sources are from our partners overseas, right, So the British and the French, and the Tunisians and the Malaysians and everybody we share, we work together. They're not spies, their representatives of their own government, and they're saying, hey, listen, a good relationship with you. You've helped us on things. Let me tell you what's happening here.
This is probably the biggest thing that these amateur conspiracy people don't realize at all. They have no conception of the human aspect of what you guys do.
I'm aware of this one story.
There was a European country and after nine to eleven, in an interview, one of their ministers says, oh, yeah, that happened in the United States, but we're Europe and this isn't going to happen here, and we're but we are keeping tabs on and he named some figure. I don't remember what it was, but it was like two hundred and fifty odd people that we suspect of having terrorist connections are who would attack the United States or
kill Americans or Israelis and Jews. And the local people at this embassy are like, we don't know about this list, and the government says, basically, oh, he misspoke.
The minister did, but I'll tell you.
Within within a week we had three or four copies of the list, not from spies, but from people who couldn't live with themselves, like, you didn't get this for me, here's the list. You just need to be careful. I don't want any more people killed. And these are patriotic people of that country. They're not our spies. If you try to give them like twenty bucks there after, they'd
never talked to you. Again, people are people, and I think the government, that government, my sense was they even knew that was going to happen, they just didn't want it to be official.
Fascinating, Well, that's the world that is never portrayed in the media, and so people just don't understand those nuances of what you do.
So I spend a lot of time in the counter Terrorism Center, and you know that tends to be pretty rough and tumble. Sometimes lives are in the line and you have to make some difficult moral calls and in doing that, and say, with John, we didn't so much talk to Rabbiser priest, but we did talk to lawyers off friggin' life and the fact that lawyers were on everything. Am I going to go to tell me I'm not going to go to jail for this?
Right? Wow?
Yeah?
So I'm just looking forward if I'm in the CIA now and somebody comes to me from the NSC and says, I want you to put together a plan to take over Greenland, just you know, as an example, just or I want you to take Denmark or Panama. First of all, I'm going to go to a lawyer, and second of all, if you're smart, you're going to say I got other things to do, right, I mean, you're going to decline
to do that. And I don't know what it was like, unlike with the Bay of Pigs, where I think they thought they were saving.
Cuba and then finding a Cold war.
So taking over Greenland, there's going to be some lawyers who have some really difficult conversations. They go to the they talk to officers that look to the law bards.
It's like, because presidents can't order illegal things.
When the Kennedys were ordering things, and when Eisenhower was ordering things, a lot of those things were still legal. Now they're not. They've kings the laws.
Yeah, that's true. So what is it you're working on now?
Well, just helping the screenwriter. You know, our book Best of Enemies got options and we got really a great company behind it, with a lot of big actors involved in a big screenwriter, and so it's very serious and we're working very hard on that screenplay. And I've got two or three other projects that are not books, but mostly Hollywood related.
It's been great, it really has. I really enjoyed this.
Oh well, thank you so much. Appreciate. I had a good time, pleasure talking to you guys, and I can't wait to keep talking to you, as is my.
Wont Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible it is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures for iHeart Podcasts.