I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. 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, as you know, we've been careful about putting our foot too deep into the JFK wormhole, but we found an interesting way in. We're going to interview and talk to one of our friends, Phil Robinson, a well known Hollywood director and writer who did fall down that rabbit hole.
So we're going to be doing that, And as always, I just want to know, what are you hiding?
Why have we done so many episodes of this show with two former CIA officers and you just refuse to do JFK until I browbeat you.
Well, as you know, dam you know, you recruit assets early. And I was four when JFK was killed and John was only two, so you know, we.
Yeah, with all the drinking we did, and now we're older, I could very well know that the CIA was involved in killing Kennedy and I forgot it completely.
All right, let me ask you this. Forget JFK. You don't have to tell me what it is. But is there a big shocking thing that the CIA did that if you told us would be like, WHOA, I can't believe that.
No, yes, but had a good way. It's like what you did this, you saved all those people.
But you know what, people are so cynical that would be like, that's what we expect you to do.
Well, it's it's a lot of ways. It's the lack of something which makes puts us oh Is at a disadvantage. After nine to eleven, we know that al Qaeda was talking about a second strike and there were plans in place. It never happened. There's a lot of reasons for that. But we you know, terrible things could have happened, bombs that didn't go. I mean, those are sort of the things I'm thinking about.
We definitely stopped lots of terrorist attacks. We've definitely stopped lots of terrorists. But is that what you're talking about him? Is that exciting to.
You for us to say it's not exciting enough, that's your job.
Come on, you want what do you want? You want to met?
It was pretty goddamn exciting that much, I can tell you.
I bet it is exciting.
But yeah, it's more fun when it's did you kill presidents and stuff? I guess that is true. I guess that is why conspiracy theories win.
Is it interesting if a president form president was a spy for us? Or if we do have to kill him for it to be interesting?
Wait?
Was a former president of a spy for you?
I'm not saying that, but it would that be interesting to you?
That would be which one ran the CIA?
Yeah, that's true.
All right, I'm excited to hear what your friend Phil Robinson has to say.
Today's guest is Phil Robinson. Phil is a Hollywood big shot. He's a writer and director, having written and directed such classic films as Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Some of All Fears, and involved with Band of Brothers and he Rewrote a personal favorite of mine. But more importantly, he's a friend of ours and for our purposes today, he's a recovering obsessive on the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.
Phil, welcome, It's very nice to be here.
It's funny just because we know you, we know that you were interested in this. I know you've done some work on the Cuban missile crisis and Beya Pigs. But how did you get involved in following the rabbit hole of the Kennedy assassination.
I was in college in I guess it was the beginning of college in nineteen sixty seven. A friend of mine was a rabid conspiracy buff and he turned me on to Mark Lane's book, excellent book called Rush to Judgment, which was a fairly scholarly dissection of the war and Report. And I think Lane did a real service by saying, Hey, the War Report's got a lot of problems. There's a
lot of inconsistencies, there's omissions, there's mistakes. Lane inferred that that was the result of a cover up, but he also implied, look, this could be a rush to judgment. They were told to come out with this conclusion. They worked very fast, and they ignored certain things, they covered up other things, and this was the result a report that said Oswald acted alone, there was no conspiracy. The conspiracy theories kind of began at that point, and I
was obsessed with them. They were fascinating. It was fun to talk about that the CIA and the FBI and the Secret Service and the mafia and anti Castro Cubans or Procrastro Cubans, and all these people were involved in the conspiracy and somehow kept the secret all these years.
I loved learning more about it. Every book that came out, I would read it, and then I would bore my friends by keeping them ball all night, telling them about the hoboes who were removed from the train tracts and the railroad overpass over Elm Street, one of whom looked exactly like Howard Hunt. And you can show the picture and you go, I guess it looks a little like Howard Hunt. There was a lot of cool stuff, and I realized, after years and years of obsessing on this,
that I wanted to believe the conspiracy theories. And then I was not a applying the same level of rigorous skepticism to conspiracy theories that I was applying to the government's case. And I started looking at them in a different light, and they all fell apart. I remember the day. It was in the eighties. I was reading a new book about the assassination, and I thought, wait a second, this doesn't make sense. They wouldn't have planned it this way.
And I realized all the conspiracy theories were constructed from today looking back at this constellation of facts and semi facts and whatnot, and you could select what you wanted and connect dots and make a scenario that made some sort of sense. But that's not how the conspiracy was constructed. It was constructed before the assassination by people planning what's the best way to do this? And if you just look at these theories from that point of view, none
of them made sense. They all seemed impossible.
Neither John nor I think I could speak for John, neither of us have gone down the JFK conspiracy. See rabbit hole, right. It's a whole industry. It's almost a way of life for some people. But with the Warren Report, I just have a really basic question in one that is, an intelligence officer always gets face, and it comes down to the burden of proof. The Warren Report says that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy.
Is that exactly what it said or did it say that we have no evidence that there was a conspiracy that others weren't involved. There's a difference between we can prove there was no one else involved in a conspiracy, which is almost impossible to because you can never prove a negative, righty right, it's unfalsifiable.
I could be wrong. My recollection as they were very definitive. I read the first volume. There's twenty six volumes of the Warren Report, and then there's some I read that when it came out. My recollection is they were very definitive. There was no conspiracy. He acted alone, there was no
second assassin. In the seventies Committee on Assassinations and they studied various assassinations, mostly the JFK one, they included a lot of evidence supposed as evidence that had come out since the Warrant Report, and they concluded it was probably a conspiracy. But they then said, but we can rule out the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, the mafia, Cuba, Russia, and anti Castro Cubans. They ruled out everybody who had ever been suggested as a possible conspirator, leaving I don't
know who. And the reason that they said it was probably a conspiracy was one piece of evidence which was a Dickta belt. A Dickta belt recording supposedly a Dallas police officer on a motorcycle in Deey Plaza had left his microphone open and there was a dickt de belt recording of this that people who listened to it said,
I hear four gunshots. Based on that one piece of evidence, the House Select Committee said there was a fourth gun shot, probably from the Grassy Knoll, and therefore it's a conspiracy. Some years later, a panel of acoustical experts took a look at this and said, no, A, these are not gunshots, and b it did not take place at the time of the assassination this recording, thereby ruling out that one
piece of evidence. The interesting thing about what the House Select Committee said a fourth gun shot from the Grassy Null. Remember the grassy Knoll is where the supposed professional assassin was shooting from. If he fired the fourth gunshot, he missed. According to that theory Oswald, the amateur fired three shots, hit Kennedy twice, the professional and the grassy null fired once, and so it kind of doesn't make sense.
So the FBI. JEdgar Hoover's FBI did an initial like fifty page overview very soon after the assassination, and Hoover himself pushed President Johnson to simply accept the FBI's report, and because Hoover did not want to open up the Bureau for criticism. They'd been monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald, they hadn't spoke with him, and obviously they weren't tracking him on the day of the assassination. And Hoover and Johnson
were pretty good friends. They lived on the same street before Johnson was president, and Johnson eventually realized he did have to have a special commission, but he nonetheless pushed them to try to accept the FBI view, which I think was right. But because trying to protect the Bureau, it was limited and it failed to anticipate all the possible scenarios and rule them out.
And I think Mark Lane was right. I think the Warrent Commission did omit certain things that they probably should have included, particularly regarding Lee Oswald's background. And my theory about that is that, as we learned from the Church Committee in the seventies, Oswald was a kind of a fringe character in this shadowy world in which the intelligence community and law enforcement at the mafia were involved in all kinds of illegal activities together, assassinations, spying on Americans,
trading political groups. And I think that Oswald, when he was in New Orleans, rubbed shoulders with some of this. And I think the Warrant Commission felt if we reveal all we know about Lee Oswald's background having nothing to do with the assassination, it could bring down the whole house. So let's just put a lid on that stuff. And I think in the course of doing that, it made it look like they were covering up the assassination, when
in fact they were covering up something else. That's just a theory.
Years ago, there was a reporting that had come out from in the press, but according to the agency, there was real indications that the GRU the Russian intelligence service, was offering bounties for the killing of American CIA officers
back then in Afghanistan and of US officials. And we could never prove that one hundred percent officially, and to a certain extent that that's good insofar as even if we're only ninety ninety five percent certain that's true that the Russians are putting bounties on the heads of our officers, that is arguably that's a cause for war, I mean,
because you have to respond to that. So you've got to have at one hundred percent learn that in the Iraq war, with WMD claiming that it was there, when it turns out it likely was, but it wasn't.
If with the Kennedy assassination, with Oswald having close ties to both Cuba and certainly to Russia, if one of the theories entertained and talked about was there is good reason to believe that Cashrow or Russia was behind this. Where does that take us? That takes us on a maybe to the brink of war, and is that really worthwhile if we can't be certain?
But in that case, you are actually suggesting a potential cover up to.
Me based on nothing. It does make sense. He was a Russian citizen, He was in the Russian embassy. Before this, the Bay Pigs had gone down. He and Cruise Jutt has squared off in Vienna the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians may have seen him, or some rogue element may have suggested to him that it would be a good idea for Kennedy to be gotten rid of zero evidence of this, right, I mean but it's how many Americans in those days were hanging out in the Russian embassy
and then having the shootcaster. I think.
But he was such a low level schmuck, the fact that they would suggest, hey, you're the one we want to kill.
The president of the United States, and we know from our business it may not have been a guy a KGB officer saying go shoot him, but a KGB officer saying, if only he were gone. There's all sorts of ways short of paying him money to do this.
Man, you are you were going down the rabbit hole, Jerry Are No, I'm the different help tree.
The difference Betwe is like, I can see that as a possibility, but it's completely unproven. It's total conjecture. I get that well.
And I think you raise a good point, which is that the Warrant report has good reason to tamp down any suggestion that Oswald was working on behalf of the Russians, because if they said he was, then we could be at war. And I think John's pointed a I would assume the Russians had better people than this, you know, incompetent to pull this off. And the other thing is, if you look at the geopolitics at the time. After the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev had a rap prochemont.
They both felt that we are the only two people who pulled the world back from nuclear holocaust, and in sixty three they were working together on a nuclear arms tree. There was actually a warming between those two men in nineteen sixty three. I don't know that the geopolitics at the time would have led the Soviet Union to want Kennedy killed because he'd be replaced by somebody who was more of a hardliner.
But if you're going down rabbit holes and you're like yes, But perhaps the KGB, the CIA had been had been embarrassed by Kennedy who didn't support them in the Bay of Pigs, and the KGB now thought Khushchef was being weak. Therefore, those people could have wanted Even if Khrushchef didn't want Kennedy killed, maybe the KGB thought it was worthwhile, or maybe the CIA wanted Kennedy killed because he wasn't strong enough.
So that's why this game is interesting, and that's why this has stayed on for thirty forty years, because if you go take any of these scenarios. They have a piece of it that's very interesting, and so of course you would want to cover that up.
In a way, it's a little bit like the religious argument of God works in mysterious ways. It's an answer to pretty much everything. I don't know that either the CIA or the Soviets would have picked Lee Harvey Oswald, who was one of life's losers, to pull off the biggest event of the century, and there's certainly no evidence that they did. And I realized one day, I felt I wanted to believe the conspiracy because psychologically this may
sound counterintuitive. I don't want to believe that one possess low life loser can have such a huge, deleterious, damaging effect on my life, in the life of my country. I'm much more comfortable believing that something this damaging, this hugest monumental, could only be pulled off by the most powerful forces on earth. Because if a nothing like Oswald can have this effect on history, then we're hanging by a narrow thread.
That's why conspiracy are comforting, right, because it helps explain unexplainable or complicated or chaotic or random things.
All Right, we're gonna get right back into that.
But first let's hear this.
Did you lose friends, Phil after you came out of the rabbit hole? And did you keep all your materials and books?
I did not lose friends after I committed that. I lost friends while I was in the rabbit hole because I bored people to tears night after the night telling them these and connecting assassination theories with the Robert Kennedy and the Martin Luther King assassination because there were tenuous ties that people would make to that. I think I probably I was persona on grata in a lot of rooms in the college dormitory because oh God, here comes Phil.
We're going to be up till three listening to these horror stories.
And it's interesting. On one of our other episodes, we had Michael Weissan, who was an expert on Russian intelligence written some books on history of Russian active measures and disinformation campaigns, and he points out that the JFK movie by Oliver Stone was actually part of a Russian disinformation campaign. In other words, the Russians saw that we were deep in these rabbit holes and picked a conspiracy to push
into different things. Now, back then, we probably didn't have the sense of this that we do now to see how beautifully evil that is to say, oh, look at the Americans are like chasing their tails here, let's throw something in the middle of the watch to meet each other up.
I have to say, I mean all of Besonde's movie JFK, I think is one of the great movies. I disagree with his interpretation of the events, but just as pure as filmmaking, I think it's as good as it gets. I love that movie.
One of the things too, that doesn't make any sense is conspiracy. Theorists now on the JFK event keep saying and hoping that one more there's one more document and it will show right. And how many administrations have we been through Obama, trum Biden, going back to Trump again, if there was a piece of paper that laid out
this hunting plan. And we've said this before, but just to be clear, some of the documents that are still being held, one of them that came out was the reason we knew Oswald was in the Russian m se in Mexico City is because we had this We had the embassy bugged and it was against Mexican law, and the Mexican president himself said, I will allow you to break Mexican law, but I will be in big trouble and my legacy will be in big trouble if I
allow this. So you must promise to keep this secret forever. But before that, people are thinking, oh, they're keeping these secrets. Oh, this has got to be the one. And then it comes out that it basically see, I had just made a promise. I come something completely different, and we broke our promise and it didn't solve anything.
Some people lie, some people forget details. But there's one thing that prevented us from ever knowing definitively for sure, and that is the wounds in Kennedy's neck and the back. Doctors at Parkland Hospital saw him lying on his back with a hole in the front of his throat. Now, the Warren Report says that's the exit wound from the
bullet that entered his back. The doctors at Parkland Hospital never turned him onto his back, They never saw a hole in his back, They saw the hole in his throat, assumed it was an entry wound, did an emergency tracheotomy to try to save his life. He dies. The body is shipped to Bethesda Naval hospital for an autopsy. The doctors who do the autopsy see a tracheotomy opening in the front of his neck and a hole on the back of his neck, so they say, okay, the bullet
entered the back of his neck. They never talked to the doctors at Parkland who thought that the hole in the front was an entry wound. If the doctor's doing the autopsy had been told, hey, there's a possibility that there was an entry into the front, they would have dissected the entire path of that bullet to see if the tissue is pushing from front to back or from
back to front. They never did that. The body was sealed in the coffin lying in state, and only then did the two sets of doctors talk to each other and was too late to examine it. Because of that one missed communication, we don't have the definitive proof that the hole in the front of his was an exit word.
There was a law in nineteen ninety two that stipulates that anything that Menson mentions the assassination must be cross filed into the JFK material. So in CIA, obviously there was such pressure even back then on the agency, like, hey, listen, we have to make sure that we keep good records of all this stuff. And so they said, any if you're anywhere in the world and someone says something about the JFK, then has to be cross filed into the
JFK material and files. And the problem then becomes that there's a bunch of sensitive material that has nothing to do with the assassination in these files. For example, when I was in Belgrade and Serbia, I met the former head of the Serbian Intelligence Service, and as I was sitting down and drinking with him, it turns out he was obsessed with the assassination and he talked about it
for the bulk of the evening of our meeting. So therefore I wrote up a meeting with the head of the Serbian intelligence Service, and I included the JFK discussion had nothing to do with the issues we were doing. But then that report gets cross filed into the JFK material. So when it comes time to release said they can't release it because it has to deal with sensitive issues going on and Serbia or what have you. But it looks like we were, you know, to the outside, like, oh, look,
they're not giving up this sensitive JFK material. But it's not in fact at all what happened.
And when we're planning our conspiracies, small conspiracies like an operation, right, we always say Murphy gets a vote, And my mind goes back to this one operation we were doing, and it was a small conspiracy and it's a third world country. We had a female officer meeting someone from a radical Arab regime and he was thinking about he'd let us know.
He was thinking of telling us what was going on in his government, but he wasn't sure yet, And so they arranged for this walk in this park and as they were walking through the park this isolated tops of trees, police jump out, five or six police and they yell, you're under arrest. And she's thinking looking at him, thinking oh, he set me up. And he looks at her and thinks, oh, she set me up. And they both looked at each other and realize nobody set anybody up. And they started
talking to the police. And I swear to God what came out of this was the police said, last year, on this date, there was a ritual murder, a witchcraft murder, in this exact spot, and we have determined that it is likely for halt reasons as a country that believes in witchcraft, that the perpetrators would return to this spot perfectly with heart of the body that they took. And so they talked back and forth, and the police very you know, it's like, oh, well, these two clearly are
not like involved in witchcraft. And she said no, he's my tutor. I'm teaching him English. And they went, oh, you can go, but don't tell anybody we're here because we're waiting for the next people and so and so, you know, we planned everything out to be perfectly done, and then when we had to send it into Washington, it's like, yeah, we didn't think about the pulp murder. Witch craft came that right.
So do you still follow this issue at all? Or has coming out of the JFK rabbit hole made you someone who's very skeptical of conspiracies in general.
I did stay in the rabbit hole for a while when Vince Bugliosi's book Reclaiming History came out, because I think it's brilliant. It's a definitive, exhaustively long examination of every conspiracy theory and every piece of supposed evidence that supports them, where he examines them very carefully and knocks them all down. There's all kinds of things he knocks down.
For instance, the opening of JFK, the film with the drug addicted prostitute is thrown out of the car and she claims, there's two Cubans on the way to Dallas and they told me they were going to kill Kennedy. Buugliosi traces tracks that down. There was a woman who claimed this, but she claimed it after the assassination, not before. The myth was always that it was two days before the assassination she was telling people they're going to kill Kennedy.
It was after. And Bugliosi does this to every piece of supposed evidence. But it's it's appealing. I understand the appeal of it. It's fun, it's cool. It's cool to say, hey, I know something you don't know. The government was lying about this. Let me spin this tale. And I love a good story. And the assassination conspiracies are really compelling, interesting, vital stories. They just happen to be fiction. But I like fiction too.
The issue of how hard it would be before the fact to arrange something, as opposed to after the fact putting it together. You put together sort of a small example of like if someone was trying to plan this, and someone was querying them what that might look like, and you sent that to us, I was wonder if it would be worthwhile reading that through to try to help make that point.
Sure.
Sure. The idea is that instead of looking back at the assassination from today, let's put ourselves in the middle of October of nineteen sixty three and the three of us are sitting together in Dallas. You're my case officers, you're my handlers. You have entrusted me with the planning of the Kennedy assassination. By the way, where would we be meeting in a hotel room or somebody's house? Where
would this take place? Hotel room would be just fine, okay, And I'm going to lay out for you the plan that I've come up with, and I would start by saying, Okay, we just got word Kennedy is coming to Dallas in late November, and we're going to kill him. We've got a guy, Lee Harvey Osworth, and he's a professional assassin. No, he's just some guy who works in a warehouse.
But he's been a hit man.
Was he military?
Yes, he was a marine how'd that work out? Not so good? He was court martialed for accidentally shooting himself a lot terrific.
So has he ever shot anyone other than himself?
Well, he shot at someone. I remember it was in all the papers earlier this year that someone took a shot at that guy, General Walker. Yeah, yeah, well that was Lee. But he missed. Okay, he missed, but he did shoot at him.
Is it a hard shot?
No, it was actually a pretty easy shot. Walker was sitting in a chair at home. It was nighttime, perfectly lit. Oswald was outside thirty yards away. Why did he miss He was using this piece of crap mail order rifle.
Oh okay, So for Trinity, we'll get him a really good sniper rifle.
No, he's going to use the same piece of crap mail order rifle.
What did he do after the route?
He defected to Russia.
I'm sorry, it sounded like you said he defected to Russia.
Yeah, he defected to Russia, but he changed his mind and we let him back, so the authorities know he defected to Russia and came back to the United States. Absolutely.
Are you a teeny bit concerned that he might be on a watch list? Or something.
Oh, he's on a watch list, are right, it's one of the reasons he's pissed off at the government. The FBI is always coming around interrogating him, his wife, his family, his friends.
I'm sorry, So why the hell are we using this guy?
Because he works at the Texas school Book Depository. Yeah, so from the sixth floor window, he will have a perfect shot if the presidential limo goes down Elm the street.
What do you mean if the residential limo goust down Elm Street.
They haven't announced the President's I tinerary yet, they haven't even announced where he's gonna speak. And truth be told, there's no reason to believe he'll drive by there.
But if he does, if the president doesn't drive down Elm.
Street, honestly, we haven't thought about that yet.
Okay, walk me through how this goes down. The morning of the presidential motorcade, Oswald drives to work.
And no, no, he doesn't drive. What do you mean he doesn't have a car. He doesn't even have a license.
How is he gonna get to work?
Probably just hitch your ride as a neighbor.
Okay, so I guess you'll stash the rifle at the building.
So when he arrives, no, no, noly, he's gonna carry the rifle with him in his neighbor's car.
And the neighbor says like, hey, Lee, why are you carrying a rifle to work on the day the president is driving by your building?
Oh?
Come on, he's not gonna carry it in the open, but do you think we're stupid? He's gonna wrap it in paper?
Hey, Lee, why are you carrying a rifle shaped object wrapped in paper on the day the President is driving?
Guy, Well, mister smarty pants, we actually have an answer for that. He's going to say. It's curtain rods.
Hey Lee, why are you carrying curtain rods to work?
Okay, that's a good question. I'll run it by Lee. I'm sure he'll think of something.
Oh good, sir, he's smart, savvy.
No, he's stupid. But maybe i'll have the guy's work on.
All right, So let me see if I've got this. This not very smart guy, who's not a very good shot, who is being watched by the FBI, is going to position himself to shoot the president if the President drives on that street, which right now, we have no Reasonablie he will.
That's our plan.
Then what what do you mean after he shoots the president? Then what what's your escape plan? How do you get him away from the scene of the crime. How do you get him out of the city, out of the country. What's the plan?
Well, I think Lee was just planning to go back to his apartment. Maybe take in a movie, take in a movie. Oh, I get it. You're worried he's going to get arrested, and if he gets arrested, he could talk and that could implicate us. Yes, worried about that. Don't worry. We're gonna kill him, Thank.
God, that's the first sensible thing you said. You're going to kill him before the police find him.
No, we're gonna kill him after the police find.
Him, before they interrogate him, right before he has chance to say anything.
No, we're gonna let them interrogate him for a few days, and then we're gonna kill him where right there in the police.
I get it.
One of the cops will say Oswald grabbed his gun and there was a scuffle.
And there won't be a cop. We got this guy, Jack Rup and he's a hitman. No, he owns his strip club, but he's killed people before. Jack, he's a pussy gut.
How is he gonna do this?
He's gonna walk into that police station and march right up to Oswald, pull out his gun.
And think, and he can do this without being seen.
Hell no, he's gonna do it on live television. What oh, I get what you're worried about? What if they arrest him? Will he talk?
Yeah, that's a concern.
Don'n't worry.
We're gonna kill him to cook, thank you.
Yeah, about three years later, we're gonna give him cancer.
Three years later, too long a little.
I sense you're a tiny bit skeptical about Plan A, So let me run Plan B by. In Plan B, Oswald is not the only shooter. He'll be up there on the sixth floor, just like Plan A, but we'll also have a real, highly experienced professional assassin, let's call him Harlows, and he'll be on the grassyno.
Good, Okay, now you're talking. What's the grassy knoll.
It's a little slope next to Oswald's building. Carlos will be at the back of the grassyno.
Okay, so what's the player.
The President's limo will drive right past the grassy knoll at a perfect ninety degree angle, and Carlos will shoot him. Then we say, hey, there's a guy in the sixth story window behind the president with a rifle. Everyone will go after Lee and he'll take the fall.
I'm sorry, So Carlos is going to shoot Kennedy from the side at almost ground level, but you're gonna say the real shooter was six stories up and behind.
Yeah, pretty good.
Huh.
I can't believe I have to ask this, But if Carlos shoots Kennedy from the side and it almost ground level, how are you going to make the wounds look like they came from behind and six stories up.
I'll tell you exactly how. Carlos is gonna shoot Kennedy in the front of the throat, but he's not gonna kill him, so they'll rush into the hospital. They'll do an emergency trachey out of me and that will obliterate the entry wounds in the front of his throat. But here's the brilliant part. Oswald will shoot him in the back of the head at the same time that Carlos
shoots him in the front of the throat. So when they do the autopsy, they won't see an entry wound in his throat because it's been obliterated by the trachy out of him. But they will see the entry wound in the back of his head, and they'll say it was only one assassin. He was the guy shooting from behind, and we put it on the lead pretty good.
Huh.
Just one thing. If Carlos is shooting from the grassy knoll at a ninety degree angle to Kennedy, in other words, from the side, how does he hit him in the front.
Of the throat?
You are so negative?
All right?
So that's our little.
That's pretty much how it could have gone down. But it's a dumb plan. I think we can agree on that.
We'll be right back in a moment.
Jerry and I are concerned about going so deep in the rabbit hole because it becomes such an industry. But if you just go back to the like, okay, playing this out for me, it all seems to fall apart. All the clever things fall apart pretty quickly.
Yeah. And also then if you think specifically about was it the KGB, was it the mafia, you always have to come back to would they have hired Lee Harvey Oswald, a guy who failed at everything in his life.
We would speak about conspiracies and myths. There's a view out there that there are professional assassins roaming the earth that can be just found via certain dark web or whatever it is. I think one of the little secrets of law enforcement is that actually, these professional assassins don't exist. There isn't a crew of people who make their living off of killing people. There's crappy, low level criminals who are willing to do something for money and maybe get
themselves caught. But there's a notion that there's these incredibly skilled professionals. Like in the Day of the Jackal or what have you just done?
Was there Carlos? Was there? Carlos?
He was a terrorist? Yes, he wasn't really a Carlos. A jackal had a cool name.
But the guy who Day of the Jackal was about the guy who tried to kill de Gaul? Was that a real personal thing?
So no, But there were conspiracies. So that go back. De Gaul gave or withdrew the French from Algeria, where they'd been for one hundred and forty years, and inside of two months, over a million French had to like bandon Algeria, where they'd been for generations, and those people, the Piagnois, they had put together over and over again conspiracies to real conspiracies to kill de gaul and they
all failed. I think the book and the movie were great, but there never really was a Jackal, that the oas the underground piegnoits resistance to the Gal, that none of them ever panned out. Now, these people were professional military and the French Foreign Legion guys, and they were unable to do it. So, Phil you famously did Sneakers and about CIA, and I was wondering, what is your sense of the role of CIA now in US politics?
Is that, first, I say, Sneakers is more about the NSA. Some of all fears, which I directed, is certainly about the CIA. My sense, and I as an outsider, is that the agency has, like everything else in American society, has gone through a lot of changes. I think that in the fifties and sixties it was probably less bound by laws and rules and was more free flowing. It was the guy, the OSS guys who were cowboys in some ways, and I think they way overstepped the bounds.
My guess is that today it's much much more difficult for the agency to break the law, and that the role is much more about intelligence gathering then the way the movies depicted, which is about cloak and dagger. And I've learned from you guys that I think the first time we talked and you corrected me said, we're not CIA agents, We're officers. We're not spies. We recruit spies, we run spies, but we're not out there with the binoculars at the edge of the nuclear base trying to
break in. I actually went to the CIA where we were prepping some of all fears, and went to the Russia desk, and what really struck me was it looked like it could be the Russian studies office at some mid sized university. It was a room of desks. All the desks had books and magazines, and everybody had little nesting dolls from their trips to Russia, and everybody had little bottles of vodka. And some of the people were
watching Russian cable television, must monitoring television. Others were reading magazines. And I realized this is the unglamorous, most important work that the agency does, which is intelligence gather and a lot of that intelligence is gathered from public sources, just watching what's available and say, oh, that guy didn't used to stand next to that guy. What does that mean?
And it was really based on that trip that we added a scene to the movie where they're watching their Russian president and some newsreel footage and someone says, oh, his jacket isn't fitting well, I wonder if he's like losing weight, you know. And that guy he was standing next to him at the conference in Vienna. No, that's not that guy. That was a different guy. And it's all these people just arguing as they would in a
college dorm. But when we entered that office, as you guys know this, if you walk down the hallway and a door opens, what you see is an interior wall that blocks the view of that room. You have to walk in through the door, walk around this little interior wall to get into the room, so that anybody walking down the hall can't see anybody in those rooms. And I said that was cool.
In the early days of CAA, when people talked about it was a rogue elephant, or it got involved in illegal things or over through countries. It was often because it did not have congressional oversight in those type of things. It was essentially a plaything of the president. Eisenhower would just say that head a CIA. It would really helped me. If you I'm getting pressure from United Fruit, can you go into wherever it did Hondurst or something and overthrow
those people. And they just acted on behalf of President's whims. And what I worry now is newly elected President Trump is he wants an organization that works specifically for him. He doesn't want outside interference, he doesn't want the Congress involved, he doesn't want to have to justify or he's doing. He wants it to be his weapon. And we spent a lot of years changing, adapting, and reforming the intelligence community to be responsive to the will of the people
and the Congress and the president. And I worry we might be going back to that old thing.
Yeah.
Years ago, I was researching the Cuban missile crisis. I did a huge amount of research into it for a mini series. And one of the things that really impressed me is that in the summer of nineteen sixty three, we knew there was a Russian military build up in Cuba, but everybody said it's not nuclear, including the CIA analysts, But It was the Director of Central Intelligence who was the one person who said to Kennedy, I think it's nuclear,
and his analysts had told him, no, it's not. And he said, look, I'll let you guys submit your report as it is, but I'm just going to tell the President that I have a different opinion. And it was based on one thing. He said, these anti aircraft emplacements that the Russians are putting in Cuba are all in circles, but there's nothing in the middle of those circles. He said, I think those will someday have nuclear launch pads in the middle of those circular array of anti aircraft emplacements.
And so they set the U two's up to go. Look, that was a director McCahon, I think.
The Director mccon, who was a Republican Eisenhower administration official. And what's interesting is after he told Kennedy this and Kennedy said, okay, sent up more two's. Macone goes to the south of France for his honeymoon. He spends all of August in France, and when he comes back, he says, what are the U two's found? And they go, oh,
the weather hasn't been good. We couldn't send them up, and so it's not until the end of September early October when the weather clears and they can send U two's and then also send those low level fighter photography planes. And that's what comes up with.
And what also happened simultaneously is is that Clendestine Service, the part where Jerry and I worked, had a really successful spy in Moscow. One of our first senior gru military intelligence spi is named Penkowski, who provided us a lot of the military books and doctrine, and so we were able to look at how those forces had arrayed themselves and look at their official doctrine and realize, oh my god, this is a setup for a nuclear thing.
So the human spy who gave us information allowed the U two and others that went over to put those pieces together and realize what was happening there.
There's a great moment to the night that the photo analysts call the National Security Advisor to say there's nuclear emplacements going into Cuba. It's a Sunday night and McGeorge Bundy is having a cocktail party at his house and he gets this phone call from someone at CIA. It wasn't the director somebody below him. It's an unsecured phone, and so the guy says, doesn't say who it is.
He says, you know those things we were talking about, and Bundy recognizes the voices he asked and he goes, they're there.
Phil. It's always fantastic talking to you. We love meeting with you and talking to you. And you've had an incredible career and little did we know you had this JFKP. So thank you for spending time with us.
It's always my pleasure. I always learned so much from talk to.
About Thanks so much for Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible It's a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.